Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!UXE.CSO.UIUC.EDU!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@UXE.CSO.UIUC.EDU ("J.D. McDonald ")
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re:ventura
Message-ID: <8905160047.AA12857@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 16 May 89 00:47:52 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 56


>> After 90 minutes, we pulled camera-ready pages out of our
>> LaserWriter, and walked them over to the print center. 

>Camera-ready pages?  From a 300x300 D.P.I printer?  Get real.  No
>real printer in this country considers a 300x300 D.P.I Laser Printer
>camera-ready.  It's good enough for in-house repro junk, but a Printer
>will not except anything less than 600x600 D.P.I. to produce decent
>quality.

I'll agree that 300 d.p.i. is not really publication quality.

But there seems to be another point too. The output that comes out
of either HP LaserJets using the regular HP Times-like font,
or the Times like fonts from Bitstream, or the output from an
Apple Laserwriter using the built-in fonts, or the blurbs I got
from our Printing Division which were printed on a Linotronic
300 (1270 or 2540 d.p.i. - who cares) just doesn't look like 
a plain ordinary printed BOOK. Somehow, however good they look,
they just don't look "right", by which I mean look like any
ordinary high quality (technical) book printed before, say, 1982.
The letter shapes just don't look "ordinary" and the spacings
don't look "right".  Take, for example, "The C Programming
Language" by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, Prentice Hall
1978, or "Modern Optical Engineering" by Warren J. Smith,
McGraw-Hill 1966. These look perfectly "ordinary", though the 
"quality" of the Smith book is only fair - there are broken serifs,
uneven letter densities, and uneven baselines everywhere.
I don't know how the Smith book was done (metal type?), but
K&R was "set in Times Roman and Courier 12 by the authors,
using a Graphic Systems phototypesetter..." or, for the Second Edition,
"an Autologic APS-5 phototypesetter".

I am converting my lecture notes to a "book" (or maybe, as two
publishers have expressed some interest, a book). I wanted it to
LOOK like a book. After looking at various alternatives, I have gone
to Latex. On either an HP LaserJet or an Apple Laserwriter,
using the Computer Modern fonts, it does indeed LOOK like a
perfectly ordinary book. The text looks a bit low-quality indeed,
but actually no worse than Smith, though for different reasons.
Figures on the laser printers look simply awful, no doubt about
that at all, due to the jaggies. It is very easy to read (I am
using 11 point type with a text width of 4.85 inches).

Now for the question - WHY do the typical laser printers using the
typical PC tools not look like books? Why have the typical fonts
used been designed to look different from typical book fonts,
even on the Linotronic. Is it intentional, and if so why? Are there
ways to make things look like a book using desktop publishing tools?

(I should add that TeX is really the correct way for me, as this
thing is stuffed to the gills with complicated equations, at
which TeX is really good.)

Doug McDonald
(mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu)