FUCHS@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Ira Fuchs) (09/20/89)
Can anyone tell me:(1) whether the promised "Math object" using Mathematica was implemented in 1.0? I know there is a demo which uses speaker/listener but I didn't see a reference to a math object. (2)whether the problem in .9 which resulted in improper letter spacing on screen in Writenow was fixed in 1.0. I believe it had something to do with using the proper font width tables or some such. As best as I can see the spacing still does not match the printed output (by a lot). Thanks.
ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer) (09/22/89)
In article <9705@pucc.Princeton.EDU> FUCHS@pucc.Princeton.EDU writes: >Can anyone tell me:(1) whether the promised "Math object" using Mathematica >was implemented in 1.0? I know there is a demo which uses speaker/listener >but I didn't see a reference to a math object. No, the Math object is not provided in 1.0. The RealTimeAlgebra application does indeed use the speaker/listener; however, it uses a very simple protocol with just one message and doesn't come close to what a real Math object should do. My understanding is that the interface used in getting RealTimeAlgebra to talk to Mathematica isn't permanent and will be replaced by the Math object. > ... (2)whether the problem in .9 which resulted in improper letter spacing >on screen in Writenow was fixed in 1.0. I believe it had something to do >with using the proper font width tables or some such. As best as I can see >the spacing still does not match the printed output (by a lot). Thanks. WriteNow's treatment of letter spacing on the screen hasn't changed between 0.9 and 1.0. WriteNow uses printer font spacing on the screen, rather than screen font spacing. This results in localized errors where there might be one extra white pixel between the letters of a word, making you think there's an actual space there. However, this treatment places letters on the screen closer to the actual positions as they appear on paper. The improper spacing might become more apparent at some font sizes or magnification values --- At bitmap font sizes, if a desired font size isn't available, then the next available smaller size is used. Thus, if you ask for a 13.2 point font, you might end up using a 12 point font. This might cause an extra white pixel here and there which will again make words look broken. However, it should again be the case that the letters are placed correctly as they will appear on the page. The problem is improper spacing within words which shouldn't cause any difference between the locations of the words or the lengths of lines as they appear on the screen and on the page. (If this isn't the case, please send me the document and I will get it to the WriteNow developers...) There's discussion of switching to using screen font sizes in WriteNow to avoid the problem of improper spacing. However, printer font sizes would still be used in computing the locations of the words and the lengths of the lines. Ali Ozer, NeXT Developer Support aozer@NeXT.com