nbeck@weber.ucsd.edu (Nathaniel Beck) (05/10/91)
I recently posted a question about cmr11 which Don Hosek was kind enough to answer. But on thinking about fonts and scaling I became even more confused and am hoping that some guru out there can make matters clear again. Emtex (and other pc tex's and latex's) comes with a series of fonts or font libraries, with a series of standard (say 300dpi laserjet fonts) at magstep 0, .5, 1, etc. Now my naive calculation tells me that cmr10 magstep 1 should look pretty much like cmr12 magstep 0 and my lfonts.tex chooses cmr12 magstep 0 for its basic 12 point type. Here are a series of questions. 1. Why should I want to keep cmr10 magstep 1 if I have cmr12 magstep 0? 2. Don Hosek has provided one answer to that question - he prefers the scaled font for some purposes. But at that point it would make more sense to think of cmr10 magstep 1 as cmrnew12 magstep 0 so it could easily be used in the application preferred by Don Hosek 3. Since I am taking up several megs with magstep .5, etc fontlibs, wouldn;t it be just as efficient to have one big library with cmr10, cmr10.5, cmr11, etc. It would seem as though I could use less disk space with that scheme, since I wouldn't need cmr10 magstep 1 and cmr12. 4. Is the issue that I would need more .tfm files, and the device drivers have an easier time taking the cmr10.tfm file and increasing its dimensions for magstep .5 as opposed to looking for a cmr11.tfm. There seems little question that there must be some advantage to the magstep scheme (I don't really believe I am smarter than Donald Knuth). So could some kind guru please clear up my confusion. Thanks in advance Neal -- Neal Beck Dept of Politcal Science, UCSD beck@ucsd.edu Dislaimer: The Regents pay me (a bit!) to distribute my opinions.
jg@prg.ox.ac.uk (Jeremy Gibbons) (05/10/91)
nbeck@weber.ucsd.edu (Nathaniel Beck) asks > 1. Why should I want to keep cmr10 magstep 1 if I have cmr12 magstep > 0? > > 2. Don Hosek has provided one answer to that question - he prefers > the scaled font for some purposes. > There seems little question that there must be some advantage to the > magstep scheme One advantage of the magstep scheme is that you can print out a copy of your document magnified by some power of 1.2, and (there's a good chance that) you'll already have the fonts around. (One reason you might want to do this is for making camera ready copy for reproduction; you get an effective 360dpi resolution from your 300dpi laser printer, after scaling it back down photographically.) (A more useful scheme for those of us in the old world would be to use the fourth root of 2, which is slightly less than 1.2. This is because A4 paper dimensions are in the proportion 1:root2; I would then have a good chance of being able to print 2 A4 pages at .707 magnification on a single A4 sheet, without doing much Metafonting.) Jeremy *-----------------------------------------------------------------------* | Jeremy Gibbons (jg@prg.oxford.ac.uk) Funky Monkey Multimedia Corp | *-----------------------------------------------------------------------*
dahosek@biivax.dp.beckman.com (05/11/91)
In article <nbeck.673824646@weber>, nbeck@weber.ucsd.edu (Nathaniel Beck) writes: > I recently posted a question about cmr11 which Don Hosek was kind > enough to answer. But on thinking about fonts and scaling I became > even more confused and am hoping that some guru out there can make > matters clear again. > Emtex (and other pc tex's and latex's) comes with a series of fonts > or font libraries, with a series of standard (say 300dpi laserjet > fonts) at magstep 0, .5, 1, etc. Now my naive calculation tells me > that cmr10 magstep 1 should look pretty much like cmr12 magstep 0 > and my lfonts.tex chooses cmr12 magstep 0 for its basic 12 point > type. > Here are a series of questions. > 1. Why should I want to keep cmr10 magstep 1 if I have cmr12 magstep > 0? plain TeX users do \magnification\magstep1 to get an overall magnification of the document (actually a half-truth, since in plain TeX, 6.5truein will not be affected by the \magnification and that's the specified default \hsize. In LaTeX, \magnification is disabled). Furthermore, many DVI drivers allow additional magnification at the print stage which allows one to increase the affective resolution of the document. > 2. Don Hosek has provided one answer to that question - he prefers > the scaled font for some purposes. But at that point it would make > more sense to think of cmr10 magstep 1 as cmrnew12 magstep 0 so it > could easily be used in the application preferred by Don Hosek See above. > 3. Since I am taking up several megs with magstep .5, etc fontlibs, > wouldn;t it be just as efficient to have one big library with cmr10, > cmr10.5, cmr11, etc. It would seem as though I could use less disk > space with that scheme, since I wouldn't need cmr10 magstep 1 and > cmr12. Well, one way of doing this, especially if you're exclusively a LaTeX user, is to go through lfonts.tex and record all the fonts that are used and only keep those PKs on the disk. For a TeX distribution I put together at Beckman, I installed all fonts refered to by preload.ori (I use lfonts.new -- see [anonymous.tex.inputs.latex-mainz] on ymir.claremont.edu) plus all plain TeX fonts preloaded plus all plain TeX fonts immediately available at magsteps 0, .5 1-5 and all fonts at magstep 0. The resulting font set, LHARC'd fit on 6 360K floppies (although the actual distribution channel was 1 1/2 1.44M floppies). > 4. Is the issue that I would need more .tfm files, and the device > drivers have an easier time taking the cmr10.tfm file and increasing > its dimensions for magstep .5 as opposed to looking for a cmr11.tfm. There's a negligible performance difference. Most drivers would open cmr10 and read it in its entirety anyway. -dh -- Don Hosek // Quixote Digital Typography 714-625-0147 dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu On contract to Beckman Instruments 714-961-4562 dahosek@beckman.com