Re: TeX fonts
Alan Shutko got most of your questions in a separate mail; there are just a
couple of loose endings.
Lo, on Tuesday, July 24, Dave Sherohman did write:
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 06:17:16PM -0500, Richard Cobbe wrote:
> > 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.
`Native' TeX fonts are bitmaps, yes, but they're also more than that. The
Computer Modern fonts were originally designed in METAFONT, Knuth's
font-design language. This specifies the shapes of the various
letterforms at a very high resolution---higher than the typical output
device. TeX calls metafont to generate the bitmap, and metafont does this
by taking the very high resolution bitmap and rendering it into a
lower-resolution form in a manner appropriate for your output device.
Sounds from your description like metafont is configured for an output
device with a much lower resolution than the one you're using.
As Alan pointed out, many of Knuth's books are set in the Computer Modern
typefaces. When the fonts are generated and printed on a high-resolution
device, you don't get the jaggies that you're seeing.
> > 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?
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Yes, that's correct.
> 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.
Try the ljfzzz mode as a start. If that doesn't work out all that well,
you can always add your own device mode through trial and error. See the
comments at the start of /etc/texmf/modes.mf. I had to do this for my HP
deskjet, which tends to print heavy strokes much darker than they should
be.
(If you decide to do this, you'll be pleased to know that you can specify
the mode as a command-line argument to texconfig, rather than waiting for
the dialog system to start up each time. Just do
texconfig dvips mode <modename>
for dvips alone, or
texconfig mode <modename>
for all TeX programs, including xdvi. You'll need to be root for those, of
course. Run `texconfig help' for more goodies.)
Good luck,
Richard
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