Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!hyc
From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: TeX Fonts ... How many are there?
Message-ID: <10915@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: 13 Feb 90 21:54:15 GMT
References: <1990Feb12.205652.12645@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
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Reply-To: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor
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In article <1990Feb12.205652.12645@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> romwa@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Royal Ontario Museum) writes:
>I am seriously considering getting the TeX diskettes from the Current
>Notes' Library, but first I have some questions which I hope netters
>can answer.
>
>Here at the museum, we use SoftQuad's troff system on a Xenix 
>box coupled with a PostScript printer.  One of the nice things about this 
>is that we can take advantage of all of Adobe's fonts.  Some of the
>one's we find useful are Goudy Old Style, Palatino, Futura.  Does TeX,
>in its public distribution, have any means of supporting Adobe fonts or
>similar typefaces?

If you get MetaFont running, you can create all the fonts you want. Of
course, you should have a good deal of spare time before you try this.
The NeXT machines are shipped with a program called afmtotfm, which
converts Adobe Font Metric files to TeX Font metric files. I don't remember
if the source code is shipped as well, but that at least tells you that
it's a doable thing.

TeX is by far the most versatile text processing system that exists; it
can certainly handle things better than troff can. And, by switching to
TeX/DVI output, you get the advantage of the device-independent output
file format. Since you're using postscript already, that's probably not a
big issue, but if you need to support any other types of printers DVI is
a wonderful thing to be able to take advantage of. I've got a program
(based on code from Imagen written 15 or so years ago) that I've been
hacking on that takes troff CAT output and converts to DVI, just 'cause
it's so handy at times...
--
  -- Howard Chu @ University of Michigan