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From: roy@phri.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Why troff?
Message-ID: <2581@phri.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 27-Jan-87 17:39:27 EST
Article-I.D.: phri.2581
Posted: Tue Jan 27 17:39:27 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 29-Jan-87 06:10:59 EST
References: <362@linus.UUCP> <106@tg.UUCP>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Distribution: comp.text
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 24
Keywords: TeX, troff
Summary: Why *can't* TeX use native fonts?

In article <106@tg.UUCP> scott@tg.UUCP (Scott Barman) writes:
> THE biggest disadvantage of TeX vs. ditroff I can see is the requirement
> of TeX to use its own generated fonts (metafont).

	We've just started getting TeX running here (see my previous
articles as to why I hate troff), so I'm not yet a TeXpert (sorry DEK, but
TeXnician looks stupid).  I don't see why TeX can't use printer-resident
fonts.  As I understand it, the only thing TeX knows about a font are the
character metrics (bounding box, width, etc); it doesn't know anything at
all about the shape of a character, or where to put ink on the page.

	Since you can take a TeX font and define it as a PostScript font, I
have to assume that the elements of TeX's and PostScript's models of what a
font is map essentially one-to-one with each other.  Thus, why can't you
take an AFM file for a PostScript font and write a corresponding TeX-style
font metric file?  You have to have the DVI-to-PostScript translator be
able to recognize that hbi10 is really Helvetica-BoldItalic scaled to 10
point, but that seems pretty trivial.
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016

"you can't spell deoxyribonucleic without unix!"