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From: bochner@speed.harvard.EDU (Harry Bochner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: A simple font question (Bold Symbol?)
Message-ID: <2564@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 13 Apr 90 16:02:16 GMT
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Reply-To: bochner@speed.harvard.EDU (Harry Bochner)
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Organization: Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University
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A couple of suggestions for faking a Bold Symbol font have gone by
recently, and no one has suggested the technique that seems most obvious to
me (unless I missed it :-). The easiest thing is just to stretch the font
horizontally: the following code gives you a symbol font that's 30% wider
than normal symbol.

/bold /Symbol findfont 1.3 1 matrix scale makefont def
/bold12 bold 12 scalefont def

The 1.3 is arbitrary, of course: You can choose whatever factor you like. 
I found 1.2 to be too little, but 1.3 looks pretty good to me. I haven't
tried the other approaches that have been suggested, so I can't compare
results, but this approach is easy, clean, and resolution independent, so
it seems worth suggesting for those who might be satisfied with the results.

Harry Bochner
bochner@endor.harvard.edu