kay@warwick.UUCP (Kay Dekker) (05/19/88)
I'm posting this for a friend who doesn't have posting privileges;
please reply to the addresses in the .signature at the base of this
article.
Kay
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I'd be very glad if someone would help me with this (possibly trivial) problem
with Metafont:
For reasons probably best not gone into, I find myself hacking Knuths
sources (Use sword! You Hack the source! The Source Attacks Viciously!!The
Source inficts 200 points worth of damage! You Die!! :
This hacking took the form of inserting filldraws and unfills with
magic numbers as their arguments (bad idea, you're all saying. Yah, Sucks,
I reply- I suppose you've never done the same?? :)
Suffice it to say that I've managed to get precisely (well, almost)
what I wanted splatted by mf onto the screen of my sun workstation. To wit, a
Knuth letter (Grooh!) with my tasteful alterations (Aaah)!.
In feverish state, I ran the resulting generic font file (...2602gf)
through gftopk, then pktodvi, and finally printed it on the local
"xerographic output machine", which we call "xom" for laughs (ho ho...)
The result was not as I might have wished.
All the bits Knuth had put in were there, good and proper, but my
additions were about 10 or 15 times too large.
I repeat: When I looked at the output on my terminal, it was fine.
I tried changing all my magic numbers to magic pt#, then to magic pt,
but the result was essentially the same.
This did not especially delight me.
Unfortunately, I appear to be the only person in this installation
remotely capable of operating Mf (which is surprising, as I'm no Mfpert),
so the best help I could get from my peers was : "erm... might have something
to do with define_pixels, or something".
The Mfbook is somewhat coy about the precise usage, care and feeding
of define_pixels, so I'm completely lost.
I'm sorry to bother the net with such a trivial issue, but I guess
that, since the book is so curt on this issue, there may well be lots of
others out there who would like to know how to do this. (although I don't
recommend _anyone_ to stare directly at Knuth's sources without
neuro-psychiatric help on hand... :)
Thanks in advance,
Richard.
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