Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!educ-isis!teexdwu From: teexdwu@ioe.lon.ac.uk (DOMINIK WUJASTYK) Newsgroups: comp.fonts Subject: Re: Bitstream Fontware and Personal TeX Inc FIP Message-ID: <1990Nov8.095144.27349@ioe.lon.ac.uk> Date: 8 Nov 90 09:51:44 GMT References: Reply-To: teexdwu@ioe.lon.ac.uk (DOMINIK WUJASTYK) Distribution: comp Organization: Institute of Education University of London Lines: 93 In article jg@prg.ox.ac.uk (Jeremy Gibbons) writes: >I have been charged with the responsibility of investigating other typefaces >for use with TeX and LaTeX. One suggestion, from TUGBoat volume 9 number 2, is >the combination of Bitstream Fontware fonts and Personal TeX Inc's Font >Interface Package. Hello Jeremy, I've got the PTI fontware stuff and I have to admit two things: first it is quite good, second, I don't ever use it. To explain. The PTI package is rather good. My stuff is now two or three years old: I don't know if there has been any upgrade, since PTI support in the UK has all but collapsed, and I haven't been able to get an answer from California. What you get is a bunch of programs that o translate Bitstream outline fonts to PXL format o read a DVI file to see what BS fonts it calls, and make a batchfile to create them, o a program to selectively unpack BS fonts from the disk on which they are delivered, o Plain TeX macros to support the BS fonts Very clever, some of these, with unexpected things like fancy hanging punctuation and very tricky things for special spacing. o Copious and good documentation, though very technical. I have used the BS fonts at 300dpi, and they look good. The Times Roman -- oops, sorry, Dutch, in particular stands up well beside CM. Dutch is much less refined, i.e., there is not the strong contrast and hairline strokes, but at 300dpi that's an advantage. It is certainly a novel and delightful experience having access to a real typeface library, although buying new fonts can get expensive. (It's worth keeping an eye on your colleagues who use Word or WordPerfect, though, since these programs are sometimes delivered with vouchers for getting free Bitstream fonts.) The program that generates the PXLs from the outlines has lots and lots of options: you can adjust the slant, tracking, character set, and much else. I don't recall a small caps face, though. You don't get macros supporting latex, but Chris Martin did a BS lfonts.tex in 1988 that works very well, seamlessly allowing you to pump out an ordinary LaTeX document in Dutch face if you choose. The drawbacks are o It's silly generating PXL fonts. These only have 128 chars, whereas the BS outline font files seem to contain about 300 chars. So the options allow you to generate three different "complement" fonts from the one outline font. This means you're juggling fonts when you need not, if you just had the use of 256 char fonts. This problem goes back to a time when drivers didn't normally support 256 char fonts, but this is de rigeur now, and widely accepted. Maybe PTI has improved this. o Again, it's silly generating PXL fonts; you just have to turn each one into PK. o The programs that PTI supplies are BIG, as are the BS outline font files. Write off about 250k for binaries and almost another 100k for each font outline. o Finally, my most trenchant criticism. If the above don't worry you, fine. You do your work in Dutch, and are happy. Then you think "my book is ready, time to send it along to the typesetter". Before I ever bought the PTI/BS stuff I phoned PTI and got an assurance that you could generate bitmaps at 1270 dpi and higher. And you can. But they don't work. What happens is that you pump out a copy of your Dutch font at 1270 dpi. Change the PXL to a PK, and put it in the proper directory. Then you run your DVI file through DVITOPS (or DVIPS, or whatever), and there you are with a nice PostScript file containing the bitmaps of the fonts at high res. Then you send this file to your local Linotronic, and ... get back a mess. All the spacing of the characters is mad, completely out. Characters all overprinted and the wrong size. In short, total failure. It was James Clark who sorted this problem out for me. Apparently the PXL files generated by the BS/PTI software has some parameter wrong. Forgive me if I can't remember the details now. But James wrote a little C utility called FIXPXRES that you run on the PXL file, and this solves the problem. Then you make your PK and carry on as usual. For my use, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. One step too many in a path that is already too twisty. And with PostScript font support now easily available through VF files, which are all provided gratis with DVIPS, I think that's the way to go. I sent James Clark's C source for FIXPXRES to PTI, but they never said anything to me about having upgraded their product, or anything. Perhaps they have, and I don't know about it. If so, I'd be glad to learn about the improvements. My summary? A potentially excellent product, released with serious, but fixable, flaws, but apparently never upgraded. Dominik