Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: Need help with metafont
Keywords: metafont, cmmi5, cmmi7
Message-ID: <1989Feb27.194658.16206@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 89 00:46:57 GMT
References: <144@fs1.ee.ubc.ca>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Distribution: na
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 30

|I  have  a LaTeX document that uses fonts cmmi5 and cmmi7. I found that the
|characters  are  too  thin when printed on our TI postscript laser printer.
|The local sys. admin. suggested adding the lines 
|
|	mag:=0.3;
|	mode:=ti;
|
|to the cmmi5.mf and cmmi7.mf files and run the program cmmf on them. He has
|had  success in making other fonts more substantial this way. For the cmmi5
|font, the head of my files looks like this: 

I think your sys admin is a little absent minded. What those statements
ask for is a mode of ti and 30% sized characters. Metafont has a hard
time rasterizing well at low resolutions.  Observe the resulting file
name:

|Output written on cmmi7.90gf (101 characters, 3176 bytes).

(The number before the gf is resolution * magnification.) Leave out the
mag=0.3.

Also the right place to specify the mode is in the command line, e.g.

% cmmf '\mode=ti; \mag=magstep0; \batchmode; input cmmi5'

You should never have to edit the CM font descriptions.  You may find
that other CM fonts don't look good on the WW engine.  In that case you
may have to rebuild the set. I don't know what settings ti corresponds
to at your site but there are suggested settings for WW engines. Your
site may already have some settings preloaded into Metafont.