bkph@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Berthold K.P. Horn) (02/28/91)
Undesireable Features of LaTeX font LASY: Does anyone have information on the following peculiarities of the LaTeX fonts las5, lasy6, ... lasy10, and lasyb10? (1) The upside down omega (char 60) is drawn with rounded serifs. The shape is pulled from cmr, but is drawn in an environment obtained from cmsy. In cmr, crisp = 0, causing `arm' to draw a sharp-edged serif. In cmsy, crisp > 0, producing rounded corners. Presumably the intend was to actually just get the shape in cmr turned upside down, without other alterations such as rounding of corners in the serifs. (2) The character widths in both the TFM files and the PK files do not agree with the widths specified in the MF file, at least for lasy5, lasy6, lasy7, and lasyb10. The most obvious way this shows up is that the characters `extends to' (char 72) and `extends to with arrow' (73) do not match up when placed next to one another. In lasy10, one can build a continuous long wiggly line by repeating char 72, but in lasy5, lasy6, and lasy7 there are gaps and in lasyb10 the ends don't line up. The character escapments in the TFM and PK files are too large. (3) The left and right arrow heads (char 50, 51) have different shapes than the up and down arrow heads (char 52, 53) in all fonts except lasy10, where all four have the same aspect ratio. In the other fonts, the up and down arrows are two flattened and the left and right are too stretched. The reason for this is that the shape depends on the ratio of x_height to u, and this is not constant. (4) Some copies of the TFM files floating around (supplied with PCTeX for example) appear to be for an early version of these fonts. In some cases, lasy6, lasy7, and lasy9 have only 13 characters defined instead of 16. These files have metric information for char 5 and char 28, which do not exist in these fonts, while thay do not have metrics for char 1, char 2, char 3, and char 4, which do. Has anyone run across these problems before? Does anyone use anything but lasy10 (which is OK other than for the rounded serifs)? Does anyone care? In fact, does anyone use any of these fonts? IF so, what are they used for?