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From: mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Why troff?
Message-ID: <639@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 4-Feb-87 22:01:15 EST
Article-I.D.: mcgill-v.639
Posted: Wed Feb  4 22:01:15 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Feb-87 03:08:11 EST
References: <362@linus.UUCP> <106@tg.UUCP>
Distribution: comp.text
Organization: McGill University, Montreal
Lines: 35
Keywords: TeX, troff

In article <106@tg.UUCP>, scott@tg.UUCP (Scott Barman) writes:
> In conjunction with eqn and ditroff problems, there are many problems
> with accents/diacritics.  Since I do not know how TeX handles these,

Very simple....for example, \'o puts an acute accent on an o.  There
are grave, acute, circumflex, cedilla, umlaut, whole bunch.  In math
mode, you can get hat (circumflex-like), check (inverted-circumflex),
tilde, acute, grave, dot, double-dot, et cetera....and you can define
sequences to access any others available in the fonts you're using.

> THE biggest disadvantage of TeX vs. ditroff I can see is the
> requirement of TeX to use its own generated fonts (metafont).

But it doesn't.

> We cannot download fonts to this typesetter nor is it fiscally
> feesable to have Information International Inc. [...] digitize these
> fonts for us.

If you can get the font metric information (character sizes &c), that's
all TeX wants....

and from phri!roy....
> Thus, why can't you take an AFM file for a PostScript font and write
> a corresponding TeX-style font metric file?

You can.  It'll even work, if you do it right.  We even have programs
here which take bitmap images and generate TeX fonts.

					der Mouse

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