Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!blob.cis.ohio-state.edu!wilcox From: wilcox@blob.cis.ohio-state.edu (Patricia P Wilcox) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: Metafont and certain .mf files Message-ID: <83114@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 20 Aug 90 19:44:00 GMT References: <33055@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1990Aug18.125641.12466@zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu> <33186@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Patricia P Wilcox Distribution: comp.text.tex Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 38 In article <33186@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> mdeck@acsu.buffalo.edu (Mary Deck) writes: >In article <1990Aug18.125641.12466@zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu> edgar@function.mps.ohio-state.edu (Gerald Edgar) writes: >> >>Just hit return and go on. The font seems OK. These are VERY tiny letters, >>so how can you tell if they are a bit weird? > >That will work, but it's only a fudge, and I don't like fudges. >(Well, this kind, anyway. :) Being a perfectionist, if it's not >right, it isn't ok. > >The fact that I even get this error indicates that something is amiss >somewhere. Who do I talk to about this? Is there a real solution? The "strange turning angle" message means that Metafont is having to go clockwise instead of counterclockwise around some part of a filled path. We used to get several of these messages when generating write-white fonts, before I fine-tuned our printer mode definitions. An overly large value of "blacker" might, for example, cause the edge of a stroke to move from the right to the left side of some critical intersection point of other strokes in the character. Usually you're just getting tiny clockwise loops at the corners of larger filled areas. A cw loop is erased instead of filled, so nothing much will show up if it's 1) tiny or 2) not superimposed on a previously- filled area. The ultimate solution might be to recode the .mf character definitions for write-white devices (changing mode definitions is only an approximation to a correct fix for printer characteristics -- for some letters on some printers, it's not a very good approximation). For example, math characters drawn with lines of width "rule-thickness" are uniformly too light when everything else is perfect on my printer, and I may one of these days throw "define_blacker_pixels(rule_thickness);" into a copy of cmbase.mf and see whether that helps. None of this stuff is magic; it just seems that way. 8-) --Pat Wilcox (wilcox@cis.ohio-state.edu)