candy@umb.umb.edu (Karl Berry.) (10/22/88)
Some comments on various articles: 1) The reason why TeX will not hyphenate Vice-President, according to p.454 (remember that Knuth lies early in the TeXbook, and later chapters should be considered a better approximation to the truth), is ``If the starting letter is not lowercase... hyphenation is abandoned unless \uchyph is positive.'' 2) A ``10 point'' font need not have anything to do with the physical measurement 10pt. It is up to the font designer to specify the size. As with so many other things in typography, it is a visual measurement, not a physical measurement. (And, as many other people have remarked, 1/72" is not a good enough approximation to a point. Please use 1/72.27", as DEK does.) 3) Although it is reasonable enough to worry about disk space from a computer scientist's vantage point, it is not reasonable from a type designers. The fact that Metafont outputs a different file for each type size is good, not bad. That means that fonts are not linearly scaled. Although Adobe claims that their implementation of PostScript does anamorphic scaling, inspection of the actual characters, at least on the LaserWriter, proves this false. A 24pt character is exactly twice as big as a 12pt character. I would see attempts to make Metafont (or TeX, as Leslie Lamport has suggested) output PostScript a giant step backwards. 4) To the person having trouble with 1pt PostScript fonts in TeX: you have to say, e.g., \font\times = pstimr at 10pt, or whatever your TFM file for Times-Roman is named. Karl. karl@umb.edu ...!harvard!umb!karl
carlson@betelgeuse.uucp (Richard L. Carlson) (10/22/88)
In article <704@umb.umb.edu> candy@umb.umb.edu (Karl Berry.) writes: > >Some comments on various articles: > >3) Although it is reasonable enough to worry about disk space >from a computer scientist's vantage point, it is not reasonable >from a type designers. The fact that Metafont outputs a different >file for each type size is good, not bad. That means that >fonts are not linearly scaled. I agree that allowing different font sizes to have different characteristics is a good idea. For example, compare "cmr5" with PostScript's Times-Roman at 5 points; I think "cmr5" is much more readable. However, I'm starting to think that the Metafont-style of generating fonts is a little bit too restrictive. A certain finite number of font sizes are compiled and available for use; there is no way to use other (often meaning larger) versions of these fonts. This problem is particularly acute for the several fonts in the "cm" group that are defined only at a 10-point size. Sure, you can scale the fonts up by some magstep to get a larger font, but (1) there is usually a rather small maximum magstep value (magstep2 on our local machine); and (2) we're back to linear scaling for these larger fonts. I think the optimal situation would be to take advantage of the best features of both systems: allow fonts to be arbitrarily scaled, but allow fonts (especially at small point sizes) to be scaled non-linearly. While we're at it, why not allow certain features of a font (such as some serifs) to be declared "optional" in the sense that they will be omitted in very small fonts or at very poor resolution, because their presence would just clutter up the characters? Like PostScript, this system would probably have to generate fonts dynamically as they are used (although it should certainly be possible to cache commonly-used fonts). But it would be a bit more general by sharing Metafont's "meta-ness". Unfortunately, this generality would probably make a real mess out of the equivalent of the ".tfm" files. But is this reasonable to expect somewhere down the line? -- Richard carlson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU ...!ucbvax!ernie!carlson