Re: TeX fonts
On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 06:17:16PM -0500, Richard Cobbe wrote:
> Yeah, this gets confusing. TeX just needs the .tfm file, which basically
> tells it how tall and how wide each letter is, as well as how far below the
> baseline it extends. There's also some ligature and kerning info (how TeX
> turns fi into one character, for instance), but that's it---no information
> about what the letters actually *look* like. This info (typically in the
> form of a bitmap) is only of use to the DVI drivers, those programs which
> translate from DVI to whatever other form of output, like PS or PDF. Here,
> your DVI driver is `dvips'.
Not really that confusing. It actually makes perfect sense to me, aside
from the part about that font having installed the tfm, but not the bitmap
needed by dvips.
> Hm. When you say that cmr17 looks almost as bad as cmr10, what exactly do
> you mean? Do you mean that you don't like the fonts very much, or is it
> something else?
cmr10 and cmr17 both come out looking like bitmapped fonts (gee, I wonder
why...) which have been blown up without decent antialiasing - the closure
at the top of "o" is so thin it practically isn't there, the sides
(particularly the left side) of "!" are jagged, the upper-left to lower-
right strokes of several letters look like they're a row of dots instead
of a line, etc. The font design seems typical enough, but the execution
appears very poor.
> If it's an issue with how the fonts are being rendered, how are you viewing
> the output? xdvi? ghostview? gv? or did you print it?
dvips sends its output directly to the printer by default and I haven't
gotten around to determining how to change that yet, so I've been viewing
it as rendered by an HP LaserJet (IIRC) 5000.
> Did you put TeX
> into an appropriate mode for your output device? (This last one is a tad
> unfair, as I don't know that it's mentioned in any of the documentation.
> Run texconfig as root, select `mode', and choose your printer. You may
> also want to select `rehash' from the main menu after you've done this
> part.)
I'll have to give that a shot tomorrow. I assume the "main menu" you're
referring to is a menu within texconfig, yes?
> (I found this documented, if sparingly, in the LaTeX Companion, by
> Goossens, Mittelbach, and Samarin; ISBN 0-201-54199-8, section 11.9.1.)
Hrm... I'm getting the impression that online documentation for tex is
hard to come by...
> LaTeX actually makes this a whole lot easier, because it's provided some
> packages which do all of the font manipulation for you.
I've picked up that LaTeX is essentially just a set of macros for TeX
proper. What do I need to do to load them? I assume that they won't
be available if I just run `tex myfile.tex` without including anything
special in the source file.
Thanks for the pointers!
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