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From: rokicki@polya.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: A C program for a Calendar in LaTeX.
Message-ID: <12909@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 29 Nov 89 19:21:22 GMT
References: <778@stat.fsu.edu> <12898@polya.Stanford.EDU> <5798@ubc-cs.UUCP> <20915@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 46

jbw@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Jingbai  Wang) writes:
> The dvips40~42 available from labrea.standford.edu (which has been down
> for a while now, they are working on it), does not support Adobe fonts
> the same way, and you may have to modify the font definitions as 
> \newfont{\hb}{Helvetica-Bold at 12pt}
> (etc...)
> \newfont{\trsix}{Times-Roman at 6pt}
> Unfortunately, this kind of scheme is not portable to UNIX System V
> and DOS, since System V only buys file length of 14 characters and DOS 8. 

Actually, dvips does indeed support the aliasing the other drivers do, so you
can indeed use h-bol instead of Helvetica-Bold if you are working on an
ancient relic of a machine.  Simply place the alias following the PostScript
font name in psfonts.map.

Sorry labrea has been down for so long; wish I could do something about it.
Get dvips421 when you do get it . . .

> Another drawback of dvips is that it attempts to solve the missing PK font
> file problem by envoking Metafont, and I feel it to be inefficient and 
> not generalizable. Since to generate Metafont, you need mf84 setup on your
> site, and you need all the *.mf file handy. In this aspect, my version of
> dvi2ps displays the unique advantage of doing best substitution and scaling 
> the font to the exact size (as specified in TeX) by PostScript scaling.

But until you've had the freedom to specify `scaled 7000' and watch everything
work beautifully, you haven't lived . . .

My main beef is that so many people use the `find closest size' as a normal
style, yielding wildly varying results at different sites and with different
drivers.  All over I see people saying `cmr10 at 18truept' or some such, and
getting widely-spaced small letters on one printer, slightly jagged
approximations on a second, blank spaces instead of characters on a third,
and no output at all on a fourth.  It's very fast to create a single font,
and once you do, it's always there . . .

Of course, having the automatic generation also solves the problem of font
storage, since instead of 8M of fonts, you need only (typically) 1M after
extended use . . .

> JB Wang

But I do plan to put in autoscaling for those who need it and don't want
to hassle with MF.  The question is, when?

-tom


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