greg@beach.cis.ufl.edu (Greg O'Rear) (03/15/91)
Specific question first, then general question: Does anyone know of a monospaced symbol font? Even if it's Courier, just as long as the symbols are there (i.e. math symbols, etc.). The application is MS-Word for DOS V5.0A, which has no easy way to format equations. Some of our users have old documents with multi-line, spaced equations (for HP PCL). Now we have PostScript printers, but nothing like eqn for Word. If they could get the characters they want and use spaces to line up their equations, they would be happy. In general, is there some quick way to convert any PostScript font to mono- spacing? PostScript pseudo-code follows: For this font, find the widest character make all characters that width (by padding with white space). Using Word for Windows or Ventura or WordPerfect is not an option, although an add-in (?) that works with Word V5.0A for DOS would be acceptable. -- Greg O'Rear Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, University of Florida Address: O'Rear@ise.ufl.edu
rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) (03/16/91)
greg@beach.cis.ufl.edu (Greg O'Rear) writes: > Does anyone know of a monospaced symbol font?... That's by far the more useful half of what you're asking for--if you need a monospaced symbol font, you need a font designed that way. (Don't know of one; sorry.) Actually, I wanted to comment on the wider question: > In general, is there some quick way to convert any PostScript font to mono- > spacing? PostScript pseudo-code follows: > > For this font, > find the widest character > make all characters that width (by padding with white space). Yes, it's possible to convert any PostScript font to monospacing--but trust me, you *won't* like the results! The problem is that fonts are designed with particular spacing in mind. Monospace fonts have fat characters arti- ficially narrowed and skinny ones artificially widened to fit the design width (in PS fonts, 0.6 of the design size) better. A proportional font can be adjusted, but you end up with both wide gaps between narrow letters and overlaps when wide letters adjoin...it looks like a malfunctioning printer. If you adapt to the widest character, you'll have extreme letterspace most of the time; moreover, I'd be surprised if your word- processing program would adapt readily to that width:height relationship. The technique for doing the adjustment is to clone the font and add a Metrics dictionary entry. If you do this, you'll want to give Metrics values with both a new width and a new left side bearing, so as to center the character in the new cell. Do this by adjusting by half the difference between new and old width (which difference may be negative!). BTW, don't just replace the side bearing; modify it. If you're more desperate for the font than concerned about esthetics, you can also twiddle the font scaling--for example, to avoid overlapping char- acters, study the .afm file for the widths of the characters you need, and squeeze the font in the x direction a little. -- Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd Boulder, CO (303)449-2870 ...Relax...don't worry...have a homebrew.