[comp.text.tex] Loading 70 fonts into PC-TeX

rhl@grendel.Princeton.EDU (Robert Lupton (the Good)) (05/30/91)

I have a friend who claims to be in the middle of writing up a
dissertation in East Asian Studies. He's using PC-TeX to typeset the
chinese, but unfortunately this requires loading about 70 fonts, and
PC-TeX runs into the 640k barrier long before this. 

Has anyone got a huge TeX set up to handle such things? It would
presumably have to run under some DOS extender, and if it ran under a
free one (such as the msdos-Gnu project's one) that would be nice.....

				Robert
				


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Robert Lupton                                           rhl@astro.princeton.edu

haccme@milton.u.washington.edu (Thomas Ridgeway) (05/31/91)

In article <10181@idunno.Princeton.EDU> rhl@grendel.Princeton.EDU (Robert Lupton (the Good)) writes:
>
>I have a friend who claims to be in the middle of writing up a
>dissertation in East Asian Studies. He's using PC-TeX to typeset the
>chinese, but unfortunately this requires loading about 70 fonts, and
>PC-TeX runs into the 640k barrier long before this. 
>
>Has anyone got a huge TeX set up to handle such things? It would
>presumably have to run under some DOS extender, and if it ran under a
>free one (such as the msdos-Gnu project's one) that would be nice.....
>

   At Washington we have had some success (although, as will be seen
   soon, we haven't gone too far with it) with SB30TeX/SB34TeX; 'some
   success' means typesetting ten to a hundred pages densely populated
   by chinese characters.

   Uh hum.  The real problem is in dvi drivers.  I am aware of nothing
   that will handle the number of fonts we need to be able to deal with
   [which will run under DOS].  *disclaimer* I have not tested *exhaustively*.
   In short, we can TeX on PCs, but need to print on something with a
   heftier OS.  This is somewhat less than convenient.
   
   If anyone is ambitious, I have a crackpot scheme for something like
   DVIcopy which would consolidate references to chinese character fonts
   and write a fudged dvi-file and temporary pk-files so as to get around
   this problem.

   'If anyone is ambitious' means I don't want to do it myself.

cheers,
Tom

dhosek@freke.claremont.edu (Don Hosek) (05/31/91)

In article <1991May30.191741.18874@milton.u.washington.edu>, haccme@milton.u.washington.edu (Thomas Ridgeway) writes:
> In article <10181@idunno.Princeton.EDU> rhl@grendel.Princeton.EDU (Robert Lupton (the Good)) writes:

>>I have a friend who claims to be in the middle of writing up a
>>dissertation in East Asian Studies. He's using PC-TeX to typeset the
>>chinese, but unfortunately this requires loading about 70 fonts, and
>>PC-TeX runs into the 640k barrier long before this. 

>>Has anyone got a huge TeX set up to handle such things? It would
>>presumably have to run under some DOS extender, and if it ran under a
>>free one (such as the msdos-Gnu project's one) that would be nice.....

>    At Washington we have had some success (although, as will be seen
>    soon, we haven't gone too far with it) with SB30TeX/SB34TeX; 'some
>    success' means typesetting ten to a hundred pages densely populated
>    by chinese characters.
 
>    Uh hum.  The real problem is in dvi drivers.  I am aware of nothing
>    that will handle the number of fonts we need to be able to deal with
>    [which will run under DOS].  *disclaimer* I have not tested *exhaustively*.
>    In short, we can TeX on PCs, but need to print on something with a
>    heftier OS.  This is somewhat less than convenient.
    
>    If anyone is ambitious, I have a crackpot scheme for something like
>    DVIcopy which would consolidate references to chinese character fonts
>    and write a fudged dvi-file and temporary pk-files so as to get around
>    this problem.
 
One of my consulting projects has been the production of a 200+
page glossary of technical terms in seven languages, one of them
Japanese. The Japanese is typeset using the jemTeX system and our
own proprietary translator for JIS to TeX input (our JIS is
encoded slightly differently than that given by moke). I have yet
to see a output driver which can print the whole glossary in one
swing but the emTeX drivers can handle it if it's broken into
multiple parts. I think the limiting factor here may have
actually been printer memory rather than dvihplj, incidentally.

We have needed to use a bigTeX (at present we're using emTeX's
btex286 since we need a full 8-bit input mouth which isn't
functional in PTI's tex386b) but that hasn't been too big of a
problem.

One thought regarding improving the printing process has been to
consider splitting the fonts into smaller pieces (say 32
characters per font instead of 128). This would certainly help
for printing with dvips where the rasters for all characters in
referenced fonts are loaded into memory at the start of the
process. An intelligent device driver, however, should only be
downloading the actually used characters, though so whether this
would really make a difference in the printing remains to be
seen.

-dh

---
Don Hosek                  
dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu  
Quixote Digital Typography 
714-625-0147