Re: RFC: cm-super fonts for X11
On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 09:55:14AM -0300, Rogério Brito wrote:
> On Sep 28 2005, Ralf Stubner wrote:
> > Unfortunately there seems to be no application that can make proper use
> > of different design sizes.
>
> Do you mean things like optical scaling?
Not exactly. Most Metfont fonts come in different designsizes, ie, the
17pt or 5pt versions are /not/ just optically scaled versions of the
10pt version. Roughly speaking the larger sizes are narrower and lighter
than an optically scaled version. The other way round for the smaller
sizes. The same goes for Type1 fonts like the bluesky CM fonts, cm-super
or lmodern. With LaTeX (and possibly ConTeXt, too) you don't have to
care about this. You just define the fontfamily you want to use. The
appropriate .fd file selects the right designsize for you.
This is different with applications like OO.o etc. These typically can
group say regular, italic and bold variants together. But they don't
understand designsizes. For them cmr10 and cmr17 are two unrelated
fonts which clutter the font selection list.
Since there are probably only very few users who know and care enough to
manually select cmr10 for 10pt size and cmr17 for 17pt size, it is IMHO
not worth installing all the different designsizes for X11.
cheerio
ralf
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