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From: dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: emTeX drivers do read PK files (was Re: emTeX, TUG, and gratuitious rudeness)
Message-ID: <8235@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 30 Aug 90 18:54:53 GMT
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Reply-To: dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 53

In article <9008301740.AA18499@jade.berkeley.edu>, DLV@CUNYVMS1.BITNET writes...
|>We've been playing eith emTeX drivers, and I'm very very happy with them.
|>In particular, they work with PK fonts (we haven't had any PXL files around
|>our disks for quite some time). It doesn't bother me that there are a few
|>extra instructions in the driver that will make use of PXL fonts if PK files
|>can't be found. But it evidently bothers Don Hosek so much that he said:

|>>The emTeX drivers have one great weakness: they use PXL files (or
|>>at least the last release I looked at did). Arguments against PXL
|>>files: they're big (PK files average around 17% the size of PXL
|>>files. Maybe some of you have gobs of disk space to blow on this
|>>sort of thing, but most micro people I know don't), they only
|>>support 128 characters in a font (a big problem for the new
|>>generations of fonts being created with ISO 8859 coding).

This was an error on my part. I should have indicated also that
when I looked at the emTeX package, all the documentation was in
German and my German is quite lousy if not nearly non-existant.
My impression based on that and what I had heard at the time of
the original release was that the drivers read ONLY pxl files.
I've since been corrected and I apologize for the
misunderstanding.

I don't remember what else I said in that posting for you to say,

|>Unless my understanding of written English is worse than I believe, you seem
|>to imply that emTeX drivers work ONLY with PXL fonts, and because of this
                                                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|>dismiss the entire package. 
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

That was not my intent. If it had been the case that the drivers
worked only with PXL files, I would have been ready to dismiss
the drivers. PXL files have been obsolete since 1984. That's SIX
YEARS. PK files have been around for almost as long. Given those
dates and the great problems with PXL files (e.g., PXL files do
not have all necessary information for proper positioning of
characters on the page), I am more than happy to dismiss the
quality of any driver which can only read PXL files.

But, as I indicated, this part of the discussion is the result of
a misunderstanding on my part, and I apologize for my
misstatemenet about the emTeX drivers. I'll address Dimitri's
other points in a separate posting.

-dh

---
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