wdc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey) (07/27/90)
Nick has successfully fleshed out the existing tab code in style and text. We are now experimenting with setting the tab resolution to 84 dpi. Why the magic number 84? As Andy Palay pointed out, the screen fonts are not the same size as the printer font. The actual rule of thumb is: AndyN becomes AdobeN+2. So for a basic kludge, we said andy12 goes to times 14 a size increase of 1.16. For an inch that increase becomes 84 dots not 72. Unfortunately, the larger the font, the smaller the difference. So this scale kludge will fail for all fonts smaller than 12 point, and will be too large for all fonts larger. However, since the goal is to make sure that strings of text will end properly before the next tab stop, this kludge works for virtually all cases. Should I use 90 dpi instead and cover andy10 and andy8? Recognize, that this is a kludge, but it puts us into a ball park where the right answer comes out most often. -wdc