Re: AFMs for Blue Sky CM/PS fonts...

["Melissa O'Neill" <oneill@cs.sfu.ca>]

Berthold Horn writes:
> As Barry says, they are *only* needed for Display PostScript.
>
> A related question is whether PFA files should be posted as well,
> since DPS needs those.  Although it is easy to convert PFA to PFB
> and vice versa using some PD software.

This is misleading, since Display PostScript systems can do pretty much
any rendering that regular PostScript system can do, and so in use with
TeX these fonts do not need AFMs. Certainly on my NeXT I can use the
BlueSky fonts with TeXview or with dvips and Preview without having the
AFMs installed. Similarly, I'm happily using the PFB files in this setup.

Only if I were setting the font up as a native font for NEXTSTEP
applications (which, if I recall correctly, itself is problematic owing
to the encoding of the font -- something to do with the space glyph)
would I need to have the font in PFA format and need to have the AFM
files.

... in another posting, Berthold Horn writes:
> NeXT does not provide a good comparison test because it is not using a
> top quality rasterizer. And on printers it will depend on the quality
> of the rasterizer also (i.e. is it a true Adobe rasterizer).

Huh? Have you ever actually seen these fonts on a NeXT? The NeXT has an
Adobe rasterizer, which in general is very up to date with Adobe's latest
PostScript version. In my opinion, it does a better job of rendering
fonts than ATM running on the Mac in my office.  This was also confirmed
by someone from Adobe (who admittedly may have been a know-nothing sales
dweeb), who, when questioned about this, told me that the Display PostScript
architecture was better than ATM.

(I'm talking here about rendering without anti-aliasing. On our Mac the
anti-aliased fonts look blurry and grey and are next-to-useless for
readability, even if they do look `cool' at a glance. In any case, various
software on NeXT's DPS does anti-aliased fonts, including a version of
TeXview, albeit one which I don't have.  In any case, I'm not talking
about anti-aliased rendering, perhaps this is indeed where the superiority
that you believe ATM to have lies, and this is how we can have such
differing views?)

Regards,

    Melissa.