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! -- With the arrest of Dimitry Sklyarov it has become apparent that it is not safe for non US software engineers to visit the United States. - Alan Cox "To prevent unauthorized reading..." - Adobe eBook reader license
