[comp.text.tex] problems with 10 point fonts on 300dpi laser printers

steve@robobar.co.uk (Steve Bleazard) (07/09/90)

I am having problems with the quality of the 300dpi 10 point fonts as
distributed.  I am using a HP laserjet II in combination dvi3ps and a
commercial postscript interprator for the ibmpc (goscript).

In general parts of the characters are to thin (the diagonal descender of the
y for example) while other parts are too thick (eg. the right hand side
of the a and the d)

I have used MicroTeX from Addison-Wesley with the same printer / interprator
combination and the quality is much better.  With there fonts all the lines are
thicker.  Am I doing something wrong? I've tried the write white code
provided with cm fonts, but there is no improvement.  Has anyone got a HPLJ
definition?

I have tried to rebuild the fonts with METAFONT specifying a larger
value for 'blacker', but this does not appear to help.

Steve
-- 
Steve.Bleazard@RoboBar.Co.Uk        | Phone:  +44 81 991 1142 x153
Snr Software Engineer, Robobar Ltd. | Fax:    +44 81 998 8343 (G3)
22 Wadsworth Road, Perivale.        |
Middx., UB6 7JD ENGLAND.            | ...!ukc!robobar!steve

clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (07/11/90)

In article <1990Jul9.082904.11449@robobar.co.uk> steve@robobar.co.uk (Steve Bleazard) writes:
> I am having problems with the quality of the 300dpi 10 point fonts as
> distributed.  I am using a HP laserjet II in combination dvi3ps and a
> commercial postscript interprator for the ibmpc (goscript).
 
> In general parts of the characters are to thin (the diagonal descender of the
> y for example) while other parts are too thick (eg. the right hand side
> of the a and the d)

Are the problems large enough to be the fonts themselves, or a resolution
problem?

There's a trick that some packages use - namely, round off the X and Y
coordinates to the nearest 1/300th of an inch.  Certainly on postscript
printers this will sometimes prevent +- 1 pixel problems.  This can
often be seen by printing a whole pile of "i"'s or "l"'s as a string
and some of them might have slightly varying widths.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis
Ferret mailing list: eci386!ferret-list, psroff mailing list: eci386!psroff-list

mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) (07/19/90)

>In article <1990Jul9.082904.11449@robobar.co.uk> steve@robobar.co.uk (Steve Bleazard) writes:
>> I am having problems with the quality of the 300dpi 10 point fonts as
>> distributed.  I am using a HP laserjet II in combination dvi3ps and a
>> commercial postscript interprator for the ibmpc (goscript).
> 
>> In general parts of the characters are to thin (the diagonal descender of the
>> y for example) while other parts are too thick (eg. the right hand side
>> of the a and the d)
>

Are you using actual TeX fonts? I use GoScript using Tomas Rokicki's
dvips and it works fine. I think I MIGHT have had to reposition the
horizontal positioning of the letters by 1/600 inch by changing
one macro in the header file. Works fine.

BUT ... there is a bug in GoScript so that all bitmaps have all
horizontal lines - including runs of pixels in characters - made
one pixel too wide. They know about this. And, to date, have not
called with a fix. You have to compensate by turning down the 
darkness control.

This is a genuine bug in GoScript. 

Doug McDonald