[comp.text.tex] Looking for Small Sans Serif Font

dak@hparc0.HP.COM (Dave Kruger) (05/28/91)

G'day,

I have an application in which I want to print a world-wide address list of
Hewlett-Packard's Sales and Service offices.  The list contains the names and
addresses of 104 offices and amounts to about 670 lines of text.  The catch is
that all this has to fit on one double-sided sheet.  Now the way to do it is
to TeX it in five columns and in a font small enough to cope.  I've decided to
use cmbx7 for headings and cmr6 for the text; I dare not go smaller---I don't
want to have to supply a magnifying glass with each copy :-).

The five column part is no problem, however, I'm still running into problems
with overfull boxes (even at cmr6, "Hewlett-Packard Hong Kong Ltd." is too wide
for the column width of 34.5mm).  It seems to me that cmr6 is a fairly "wide"
font.  I need something a little more condensed.  Times Roman would probably do
the trick, but I don't have it (or a Postcript printer).  Failing that, cmss6
might fit the bill.  Therefore, . . .

I'm looking for a six-point sans serif font.  I've looked in appropriate places
like ymir, to no avail.  I've even tried generating a six-point version of cmss
with John Sauter's CM font resizing kit, but TeX mumbled something about bad or
corrupt TFM files, and reported that font metric information was not loadable.

I know enough about Metafont to know that you can't just set font_size# to 6pt
and expect to get a smaller font that works.

Can anyone help me please?  *Is* there a way of generating sizes smaller than
10pt with John Sauter's method?  Does anyone have Metafont source cmssbx7 and
cmss6?  Alternatively, does anyone have TFM and PK files for these
(non-standard) fonts?  My output device is an HP LaserJet II.

Any help appreciated.

Regards,

Dave Kruger
______________________________________________________________________________
Hewlett-Packard Australian Telecom Operation | HP-UX:  dak@hpauto.hp.com
31 Joseph St, Blackburn, Victoria, 3130.     | HPdesk: Dave Kruger / HP9601/RG
Phone: +613 8952798, Fax: +613 8989257       | ACSnet: dak@hpauto.oz

spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz) (05/28/91)

< wants cmss6>
If you are using a PostScript printer, you would find it very easy to
use PS fonts at whatever size you like. in fact, you could run some
trials with sizing the font until the longest line *exactly* fitted
the line width - maybe the answer is 6.345pt, for instance.

Sebastian
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Sebastian Rahtz                        S.Rahtz@uk.ac.soton.ecs (JANET)
Computer Science                       S.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Bitnet)
Southampton S09 5NH, UK                S.Rahtz@sot-ecs.uucp    (uucp)

dhosek@euler.claremont.edu (Don Hosek) (05/29/91)

In article <1390002@hparc0.HP.COM>, dak@hparc0.HP.COM (Dave Kruger) writes:
 
> I'm looking for a six-point sans serif font.  I've looked in appropriate places
> like ymir, to no avail.  I've even tried generating a six-point version of cmss
> with John Sauter's CM font resizing kit, but TeX mumbled something about bad or
> corrupt TFM files, and reported that font metric information was not loadable.


Hmm, it worked fine for me. Here is the MF file I used:

% This is cmss6.mf as of 28-May-1991
design_size:=6;
input b-cmss;

-dh

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