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From: farrier@Apple.COM (Cary Farrier)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga Print Quality
Keywords: Desktop Publishing, Word Processing
Message-ID: <47461@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 18 Dec 90 17:30:55 GMT
References: <47347@apple.Apple.COM> <641@cbmger.UUCP>
Organization: Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 42

In article <641@cbmger.UUCP> peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) writes:
>But to achieve this, every driver would have to know every existing
>font in every available size, or every driver would have to have a
>font scaling machine incorporated. I fear this is not feasible.

Not really, the driver could just look for a larger existing font size
or scale the existing font.  Scaling would not be too hard, it is simply
a bit map magnification, and smoothing is already implemented.

>And "try the best it can" would always lead to different results on
>different printers. So the word processing software simply wouldn't
>know how many characters fit on one line (prop spacing!) and it wouldn't
>be able to help the user in correct hyphenation. Or would you let this 
>also to the printer driver? :-)

No, it wouldn't.  The point sizes of fonts and the kerning information is
standard information in the system, readily available.  By "try the best
it can", I meant that the driver could attempt the best possible output
quality, but it doesn't have to break the rules to do so.

>The Amiga OS tries to get true copies of the screen bitplanes on every
>graphics capable printer, also dumb ones. You can choose density and
>anti-alisasing to improve quality. But there is no font engine built
>into the printer drivers.

There doesn't need to be, a printer driver can use graphics.library
just as easily as any other process.

>In WB 2.0 you have already simplified scalable fonts, a real scalable
>font engine (I think Compugraphic fonts) is said to appear soon.

I look forware to the day that 2.0 will run on all the Amigas, then.

Cary
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