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From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: screen fonts for emTeX?
Message-ID: <1990Dec9.152841.21421@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 9 Dec 90 15:28:41 GMT
References: <1990Dec8.150409.6938@sbcs.sunysb.edu> <864@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>
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Organization: School of Chemical Sciences, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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In article <864@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU> terry@math.ucla.edu (Terence J. McKiernan) writes:
>*** apology at the top for the length of this posting ... ***
>
>In article <1990Dec8.150409.6938@sbcs.sunysb.edu> kroe@sbcs.sunysb.edu (KiYun Roe) writes:
>>I recently downloaded the excellent emTeX system.  The only thing I
>>dislike is that when I preview things on the screen, I have to scale
>>the printer fonts down to see the width of the page.  The scaled fonts
>>are ugly and difficult to read.
>
>Kiyun,
>
>I am also interested in generating screen fonts for a PC; I would
>appreciate it if you would send me copies of the responses you get.
>
>I am installing TeX (SB30TEX) on a bunch of PS/2s with 12" color VGA
>screens, so the resolution is around 70-72 dpi.  We also have TeX installed
>on a UNIX network of Sun 3 and SPARC machines.  On the UNIX side, we have
>the font generation info for literally hundreds of fonts, but they are all
>generated for 300 dpi (laser printers).
>
>
>Why am I telling you all this?  Well, two reasons:
>
>	1. I posted news asking for mode defs for VGA.  Twice.  No
>response, except for people who wanted the same information.  Why is this
>information so hard to find?


>
>One thing our TeX expert pointed out was that the resolution of the PC screen
>is so low, the images are not really good, and you are unlikely to notice
>if a squiggle is a little off here of there.  As long as the font
>resolution is CLOSE, you should be in good shape.  So ...
>
>I generated some fonts using the DD format, and, y'know, they
>look pretty damn good on a VGA screen.  So, my advice is that you use those
>mode defs, or anything that looks close, and generate your fonts on some
>other machines / get them from an archive site.
That is right. Best, however, just to get them already made. My
DVIVGA previewer comes with a set of fonts selected especially for
use at screen resolution on, you guessed it, a VGA. It is on
simtel20.army.mil, all the dvivga? files except the first or last,
which are the previewer itself and the source code. They will work
for sure with the Emtex previewer as well as dvivga and dvimswin,
about other previewers I don't know.

>
>One other good points, credit again to our TeX expert:  Many previewers
>will let you select the dpi of the font files.  


Dvivga, (for PC with VGA or EGA), Dvimswin (for Microsoft Windows) and
the Emtex previewer let you chose the dpi you want. The first two
(mine) allow you to change the d.p.i. while running. The output from
any of these three previewers is very readable indeed on a VGA.
In my personal opinion the other previewers I have seen for the PC 
are not as good as these. If you are using somethine else, you should
try one of these three.

Emtex will downsize 300 d.p.i.  fonts to the screen in gray scale
and the results look wonderful. But it is slow when it does all that
work. Better just use screen size fonts.

Doug McDonald