nvi@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Charles C. Allen) (02/28/91)
I was very surprised to find that the Tekton font from Adobe has numeric characters of varying widths. This renders it useless for many intended uses here. It is the first font I've run across where this happens. Do other people have comments on this? Should I be surprised? Charles Allen Internet: cca@physics.purdue.edu Department of Physics HEPnet: purdnu::allen, fnal::cca Purdue University Bitnet: cca@fnal.bitnet 1396 Physics Building West Lafayette, IN 47907-1396 talknet: 317/494-9776
rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) (02/28/91)
nvi@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Charles C. Allen) writes: > I was very surprised to find that the Tekton font from Adobe has > numeric characters of varying widths. This renders it useless for > many intended uses here. It is the first font I've run across where > this happens. Do other people have comments on this? Should I be > surprised? It's not surprising to find it in a display face. I suppose you've hit the problem because you wanted it as a text face rather than a display face? It's a type-designer's tradeoff: It's unnatural to make the figures uniform width, the "1" being particularly unpleasant. However, if you don't, you can't set columns of figures which align properly. Therefore the normal decision is to have uniform widths for faces intended for text use, otherwise possibly not. I did a quick check on the Adobe faces I've got; the ones which have non-uniform-width figures are: Boecklin Cottonwood Fette Fraktur Freestyle Script Trajan VAG Rounded Bold ...all display faces. Curiously, good ol' Zapf Chancery Medium Italic has uniform-width figures. I wonder if that was an Adobe change to the face back in the earlier days of their work. Some typeface designs have two sets of figures--lining and non-lining (cf my question last week on readability). Adobe has this in at least one "expert collection" I've looked at. I'd assume that in such a font, the lining figures would be uniform width and the non-lining wouldn't. -- Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd Boulder, CO (303)449-2870 ...But is it art?
rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) (03/01/91)
A little more about the problem posed by nvi@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Charles C. Allen): > I was very surprised to find that the Tekton font from Adobe has > numeric characters of varying widths. This renders it useless for > many intended uses here... Depending on what sort of software you're using with the fonts, you may be able to work around this: You can add a little PostScript to give you a font which works like the base font except that the figures will be constant width. The re-encoding basic idea is in the Red book - they show just a width adjustment, but you should do side-bearing adjustment also. For example, pick a width (either digit 0 or widest digit) and set up a /Metrics entry with [sidebearing,width] entries for each digit, using the chosen width and a sidebearing calculated as original sidebearing - 1/2(new width - old width) It's possible to write this as a general PostScript procedure which will gather all the crud out of the font itself (looking for Encoding, doing stringwidth and charpath/flattenpath/pathbbox for each digit character, etc.) for any arbitrary font, but it's a lot easier to write something which massages the appropriate part of the .afm for the font into a (much shorter) piece of PostScript to adjust that one font. -- Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd Boulder, CO (303)449-2870 ...But is it art?