Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!mtxinu!ed
From: ed@mtxinu.COM (Ed Gould)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Why are postscript fonts so tight?
Message-ID: <904@mtxinu.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jun 89 18:02:48 GMT
References: <1974@bunyip.cc.uq.OZ> <2285@basser.oz>
Reply-To: ed@mtxinu.COM (Ed Gould)
Organization: mt Xinu, Berkeley
Lines: 23

>>It seems to me adobe have made a mistake with their fonts. They all
>>have an extremely annoying tendency to run together.

>The main reason is that PostScript does no kerning.  Each character has
>a width and is printed using its width all the time in ignorance of
>the adjoining characters.  ...  It would be quite possible
>to implement kerning in PostScript with sufficient printer resources.

Implementing kerning in PostScript is probably a lose, since essentially
nobody uses PostScript to compute line breaks and the like.  Whatever
formatter does the page layout must know where the characters will
actually land on the page; it cannot have the post-processor reposition
things for any purpose.

Of course, if there were a character-pair spacing matrix, formatters
could use this information to good advantage.  Maybe a way to load
an override-spacing matrix would be a good thing.

-- 
Ed Gould                    mt Xinu, 2560 Ninth St., Berkeley, CA  94710  USA
ed@mtxinu.COM		    +1 415 644 0146

"I'll fight them as a woman, not a lady.  I'll fight them as an engineer."