Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!husc6!contact!umb!candy
From: candy@umb.umb.edu (Karl Berry.)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Various article threads.
Message-ID: <704@umb.umb.edu>
Date: 21 Oct 88 21:07:04 GMT
Organization: UMASS-Boston, Boston, MA
Lines: 33


Some comments on various articles:

1) The reason why TeX will not hyphenate Vice-President,
according to p.454 (remember that Knuth lies early in the TeXbook,
and later chapters should be considered a better approximation to
the truth), is ``If the starting letter is not lowercase...
hyphenation is abandoned unless \uchyph is positive.''

2) A ``10 point'' font need not have anything to do with
the physical measurement 10pt. It is up to the font designer
to specify the size. As with so many other things in typography,
it is a visual measurement, not a physical measurement.
(And, as many other people have remarked, 1/72" is not a good
enough approximation to a point. Please use 1/72.27", as DEK does.)

3) Although it is reasonable enough to worry about disk space
from a computer scientist's vantage point, it is not reasonable
from a type designers. The fact that Metafont outputs a different
file for each type size is good, not bad. That means that
fonts are not linearly scaled. Although Adobe claims that their
implementation of PostScript does anamorphic scaling, inspection
of the actual characters, at least on the LaserWriter, proves
this false. A 24pt character is exactly twice as big as a 12pt character.

I would see attempts to make Metafont (or TeX, as Leslie
Lamport has suggested) output PostScript a giant step backwards.

4) To the person having trouble with 1pt PostScript fonts in
TeX: you have to say, e.g., \font\times = pstimr at 10pt,
or whatever your TFM file for Times-Roman is named.


Karl.     karl@umb.edu     ...!harvard!umb!karl