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From: jprice@uclapp.physics.ucla.edu (John Price)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: TeXtures question
Message-ID: <0093AF03.C4021560@uclapp.physics.ucla.edu>
Date: 9 Aug 90 20:27:08 GMT
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In article <8068@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>, dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.) writes:
>In article <0093AE7D.ADDF3D20@uclapp.physics.ucla.edu>, jprice@uclapp.physics.ucla.edu (John Price) writes...
>>	I have run TeXtures on a Mac here at school, with a Deskwriter, and 
>>the output is indeed very good for a bitmap font.  However, the Deskwriter 
>>is capable of much better.  Using the Deskwriter fonts, (which, I believe, 
>>are outline fonts), the quality is noticeably better.  So, I *really* want 
>>to do it this way, if I can.
>
>Actually, if all goes well, the best quality is given by bitmap
>fonts. 
...
>All of this, however depends on a couple of things:
>(1) that the font is available AT THE SIZE REQUESTED. 

	The only problem with this is, suppose you need something in a font 
that isn't available?  I may get the exact numbers wrong, but the fonts 
that come with TeXtures are 10, 12, 14, 18, and 24 pt.  14pt may be 
missing; I'm too far away from our Mac to go look it up.  However, when you 
load fonts for TeX, the common sizes are 10 pt scaled \magstep1-\magstep5, 
or 10, 12, 14, 17, 21, and 25pt.  So, some rescaling of fonts is necessary. 
This is where the bad quality comes in, as Don rightly points out.

>(2) The font is tuned to the printer technology.

	This is a point I hadn't considered.  Since I know nothing about 
it, though, I'll take your word for it.

>(3) the fact that the pixel spacing of a letter is not
>necessarily the TFM width rounded to pixels. 

	This is something I've seen in practice.  Spacing between letters 
and words is very different on TeX output from our Mac and that from our 
VAX.  All the layout appears to be the same - in other words, a given page 
from one implementation will have the same content as that from the other 
implementation - but the spacing on the pages is different.

	Earlier today, by the way, I tried assigning one of the outline 
fonts to TeXtures.  The command I used was something like

	\font\twelverm = Times at 12pt

	It worked beautifully.  The output was as good as I would normally 
have expected from the Deskwriter.  The layout, however, was different, 
which I attribute to differences between the Mac's Times font and 
cmr10 scaled\magstep1 (there's a reason for using this instead of cmr12, 
but I forget what it is...)

	There appear, however, to be incompatibilities between TeXtures and 
"normal" Mac fonts.  I'm still working on it, and I'll let y'all know if I 
come up with anything brilliant.  Or, even if anyone else *tells* me 
something brilliant...

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