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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re: PostScript printers vs. ImPress printers
Message-ID: <672@uw-beaver>
Date: Wed, 30-Jan-85 16:54:00 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.672
Posted: Wed Jan 30 16:54:00 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Feb-85 00:50:02 EST
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Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: Bruce Nemnich <godot!bruce@cca-unix>


At the Usenix typesetting BOF, I was one who was pretty skeptical about
scaling fonts from one master description over such a wide size range at
this resolution, but I hadn't seen the output yet.  I spent some time at
the Sun booth the next morning, and I came away very impressed.

They evidently have some very good algorithms for generating well-tuned
fonts at medium/low resolution; I found it hard to believe they were
generated without hand tuning (especially at < 6pt!).  I have always
been a big believer in disproportionate scaling of stroke thickness and
glyph width, especially at medium-to-low resolution since some engines
do a lousy job with fine strokes and it is *so* difficult to generate
optically correct lowres rasters, but the quality of Adobe's fonts does
not degrade nearly as much as I expected at small point sizes.  I have
done some low-resolution work with the old metafont, and it is difficult
to get reasonable results without hand tuning.  I am happy to hear they
are sensitive to the differences among engines and tune their algorithms
to each.

Halftones are another difficult problem with which they seem to have
done quite well, though I didn't see too many examples.  I am probably
going to buy one of these things instead of the QMS 800 I planned to
get; it's so much more "the right thing" (cheaper, too!).

The word I got from QMS is that they have about a half-dozen beta sites
for the 1200A.  The 2400 will be the next to be converted; they haven't
committed to doing a version for the 800.

--Bruce Nemnich, Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
  ihnp4!godot!bruce, bjn@mit-mc.arpa ... soon to be bruce@tm.arpa