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From: tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Subject: Re: TeX Printing
Message-ID: <18790002@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 26 Mar 91 20:10:40 GMT
References: <1991Mar25.151206.16800@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 57

sdl@lyra.mitre.org (Steven D. Litvinchouk) writes:
>
>
>I have PasTeX myself.  If your version of TeX is similar, then you
>need to have either the "gf" (bitmapped) fonts, or the "pk" (bitmapped
>and compressed) fonts for printing.  Since your printer is 24-pin you
>will need "pk" fonts in resolutions of 360 dpi or more.  I find that
>DVIPrint looks for even much greater resolutions (600+ dpi!);
>apparently it then scales them.  So I would suggest recording which
>fonts DVIPrint and ShowDVI say are "not found"; and then getting those
>"pk" fonts in the right resolutions.  (ShowDVI needs different
>resolutions than DVIPrint, because it is trying to display the output
>in various magnifications.)  You can try ftp'ing the bitmapped fonts
>from labrea.stanford.edu; or making your own with MetaFont.
>

I'm rather a novice at TEX, but I'd like to relate my experiences. 
Maybe they will be useful particularly because I _am_ a novice!  I,
too, am using PasTeX.  I found a whole bunch of fonts (gack, nine
megabytes of .pk files eating up hard disk space!).  First thing I
found was that you must have .tfm files for the font type; they tell
TEX how to space things out for that font.  You don't need the .gf
or .pk fonts till you actually preview or print.  The .pk fonts
appear in lots of resolutions, or equivalently in lots of sizes.
So, a 300 dpi cmr10 prints as a 10 point font on a 300 dpi printer,
but if you have a "\font\cmrtwenty=cmr10 at 20pt"  (I think that's
about right), or a big enough \magstep, the printer driver that
thinks it's driving a 300 dpi printer will look for cmr10 in a
600dpi resolution, and print it on the 300dpi device, yielding a 20
pt typeface.  The TEXbook by Knuth mentions you don't want to get
too carried away scaling, particularly small fonts, because they are
designed to look right at the size they were built for.  So, an
alternative is to generate fonts all at nominally 300dpi, for a
bunch of different point sizes.  One set of fonts I have does just
that.  BTW, the source of fonts I picked up had them listed not as
300dpi, etc., but as 1.000, 1.200, etc., implying such-and-such
magnification from default (and they were intended for 300dpi
printers).  I just renamed them to the 300, 360, etc., fonts in 
the naming convention that DVIPrint was set up to use.  As I 
understand, DVIPrint can be given a template that describes the 
font naming so it handles whatever you might already have.

Also, before I found fonts to make 300dpi printing feasible (and got
the memory for my LaserJet ;-), I used DVIPrint to output at 100dpi.
If the fonts that your .dvi file is invoking are not available in
the size the print program deems necessary, and they aren't
generated by METAFont for you, I can imagine it won't work.  So you
might try printing at a different resolution, where there may be the
fonts that you need.  As I understand the concept, you should be
able to take the .dvi file to any system that can print or show .dvi
files and, if the fonts required are available, print or show on
that system.  One nice thing about using PasTEX's ShowDVI and
DVIPrint with a laserprinter is that in one mode (100 dpi), you can
print and show exactly the same things (albeit rather poor print
resolution).

Hope this rambling is some small help...