Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Path: utzoo!utgpu!tj
From: tj@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Terry Jones)
Subject: Re: Adobe Type Manager (long)
Message-ID: <1990Dec7.210435.9368@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCS Public Access
References: <4053@mindlink.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 90 21:04:35 GMT

Bruce Dunn makes some good points about ATM. There are weaknesses and the
documentation isn't exactly up to programmers reference manual specs. But I
am not sure Adobe wants it to be that way. Perhaps they will 
Publish some other documentation giving more detailed information
about all the options in the ATM.ini files etc. I have to agree
that the documentation is sparse.

Much of the discussion concerned how good things looked on screen. The complaint is that Helv looks better than Helvetica at small point sizes. I think the 
answer to this is obvious, ATM does a good job making Helvetica at small point sizes. Microsoft has a font called HELV that has a shape that happens to look
better on screen at 72 dpi than does Helvetica. I find that in most cases 
ATM does about as good a job as possible in faithfully reproducing
the proper shapes of characters on low resolution devices INCLUDING screens.

Obviously hand tuned fonts can look better than machine tuned fonts. But, the 
Windows fonts that may look good, are not accurate. Its comparing Apples
and Oranges.

tj

P.S. If you want another weakness of ATM (and I am an ATM fan) try installing
something like CASLON 540 when you use a PostScript printer. ATM doesn't know
whether that font is installed on your PostScript printer, but assumes it is.
You get Courier. You have to edit win.ini to add the pointer to the
.PFB file on the end of the line. A bit crude I would say.