Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!gatech!gitpyr!robert
From: robert@pyr.gatech.EDU (Robert Viduya)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: Standard font formats.
Message-ID: <5352@pyr.gatech.EDU>
Date: 8 Apr 88 02:24:48 GMT
Reply-To: robert@pyr.UUCP (Robert Viduya)
Organization: Office of Computing Services, Georgia Tech
Lines: 31

[ My apologies if this gets posted twice; our spool system filled up
  just as I posted the original and I'm not sure if it got out there or
  not.]

My personal opinion about standard font formats is that they shouldn't
use a bitmap representation.  Bitmaps are tied to a particular device
resolution and are difficult to scale properly to other resolutions.
I've had to maintain TeX fonts (using the gf format) on some of our
local machines and having to keep multiple copies of the same font on
disk to support various devices at 100 dpi and 300 dpi (not to mention
write-white vs write-black or various orientations) is rather
time-consuming and disk-consuming especially if one considers that the
information is identical in all aspects save quality.

A spline/vector outline that is filled in is better.  They can be scaled
and rotated to any resolution or orientation by simply applying standard
graphics transformation formulas.  The Hershey fonts are encoded in this
manner and PostScript allows fonts to be encoded in this manner as well
(PostScript allows one to be quite imaginative in what one can do with
an outline font).  A METAFONT input file (which is the only truely
device independent font description in the TeX system) is fairly close
to this model, but not quite exact (the METAFONT model doesn't use
outlines).

			robert


-- 
Robert Viduya						  robert@pyr.gatech.edu
Office of Computing Services
Georgia Institute of Technology					 (404) 894-6296
Atlanta, Georgia	30332-0275