iltis@ucsbcsl.UUCP ( ) (07/08/85)
Here's the problem: We wanted to print an MS-Word document on the laserwriter that had many equations in it. We had originally written the equations using the Princeton font, and decided to leave it that way, converting the non-equation paragraphs to Times-12. It took Word > 10 MINUTES to print out one of the pages, consisting of about half princeton and half times-12 text. Apparently, Word ver. 1.0 is very slow in printing bit-mapped stuff (e.g., the Princeton font) on the laserwriter. The upgrade (ver 1.05) according to Microsoft provides a %400 percent improvement in laserwriter speed, but even 2.5 minutes for a page of text with bit-mapped fonts seems slow. Also, the appearance of the princeton font on the laserwriter was very poor, the characters were too light and some had been cut off, for example, the infinity symbol looked more like an alpha. What gives? Is the slow printing speed a problem unique to Word or the Laserwriter, or Postscript or what? Our temporary solution is to convert all the equations to times-12 also, and use the Laserwriter internal symbol font where necessary. However, there is absolutely no correspondance in the keyboard mapping between Princeton special characters and the symbol or Times font, thus making the conversion rather difficult. Finally, although some special characters can be accessed in times-12 using the option key, other special characters are only available in the symbol font, thus neces- sitating a font change (clumsy in word, even using the keyboard short cuts) just to get an epsilon or tau. Are there any efforts underway to propose some sort of standard for WYSIWYG mathematics word processing? For example, a standard keyboard mapping configuration for non-ASCII characters would be a big help. Does the Laserwriter internal symbol font follow some sort of standard? -- All opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of my employer Ronald A. Iltis UCSB Dept. ECE