candy@umb.umb.edu (declarer/Karl B./dummy) (06/16/88)
If you are trying to make page-high letters, you're not setting type anymore, you're making a picture. Therefore, it is unreasonable to expect text processing programs to handle this gracefully. I doubt that you can do it with Metafont because of the memory limitations, not to mention the biggest legal integer is 4096. (But you could ask for magstep 50, perhaps.) Using the PostScript fonts, as Ken suggested, isprobably easiest. I read a preprint of Richard Rubinstein's book, and thought it was an excellent introduction to the subject of digital type. It was certainly a little simplistic in places, but that's only to be expected from an introductory book. (Especially the type design issues, I thought.) The illustrations seemed good, although of course I was looking at a xerox of a xerox of a... I'm not sure if a book like this, a general survey of the field has been written before. I'd highly recommend it if you have only used word processing programs say, or Macintosh ``publishing'', and want to get a better grasp on what you're really doing and the programs you're invoking and the letters you're printing. In a third unrelated topic, does anyone know the relative frequency of all the letters and word lengths? I know the first are ``etaion shrdlu'', from Fredric Brown's story, but what of the rest? Karl. karl@umb.edu ...!harvard!umb!karl