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From: pallas@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Joe Pallas)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Ragged right margin in TeX. HEEEELP....
Keywords: TeX, dvi2ps, w_dvi2ps
Message-ID: <1989Dec8.184638.13891@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 8 Dec 89 18:46:38 GMT
References: <583@nikhefh.nikhef.nl>
Sender: USENET News System <news@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 24

In article <583@nikhefh.nikhef.nl> a27@nikhefh.nikhef.nl (Marcel Prins) writes:

>But.... When we want to print a dvi-file with w_dvi2ps, there seems
>to occur some problems with the inter-letter spacing. This causes
>a ragged right margin. In plain text it's difficult to see it, but
>in the table of contents it looks awfull. 

There is an error in the original Neal Holtz version of dvi2ps that
has been carried along into most of its descendents.  The error is in
the character definition section, where it tells PostScript that the
character has a non-integral width (x-escapement).  The rest of the
code does calculations in typical DVI-to-whatever style using the
integral pixel width, and so the PostScript interpreter's current
position drifts away from what dvi2ps thinks it is.

Usually things average out so the difference is not more than a pixel
or two.  But a long string of repeated characters, like the dots in a
table of contents, will accumulate the same error n times.

Ordinarily this is easy to fix (change cw to an int, and use
PixRound(ce->tfmw, hconv)), but I'm not sure how the PostScript-scaled
offsize fonts fit in to this solution.

joe