Re: fontname postfixes

[Berthold Horn <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

At 21:20 1999-02-21 +0100, Walter Schmidt wrote:
>On Sun, 21 Feb 1999 14:10:08 -0500, Berthold Horn wrote:

>>I personally don't like algorithmic transformations of this nature.
>>If the designer wanted a condensed version he/she would
>>have designed one.  Ditto for slanted, smallcaps etc.  The
>>fake ones do not look typographically correct.  

>I agree, as far as text fonts are concerned.

>OTOH you cannot provide "faked" math fonts without such tricks;
>see e.g. the fonts used by mathptmx.sty or mathpple.sty.
>They rely heavily on "artificial" sloping.

And are ugly as a result.  I don't know why using ugly math fonts
is any more noble than using ugly text fonts.

If I am going to mess up my fonts I prefer to do it using
appropriate tools to actually change the font itself.  Then
I can do a little to make them look a bit more reasonable.

>Does this mean that DVI previewers which are ATM-based cannot 
>display this?  This could explain various error reports concerning
>bad display of the slanted Euler fonts, which mathpple uses for 
>the greek letters.  (I'm using Ghostscript/GSview for previewing,
>so I never get aware of any such problems myself.)

It depends on what the system supports and what the previewer
does.  Generally speaking they do not support  fake condensing.
They may support fake italic and fake bold (which DVIPS does 
not do - although I have the same opinion about the quality...)

Typically when you use a style file with a microscopic footnote 
saying "driver support required" you are dealing with something
that will work with DVIPS, and may or may not be supported otherwise.
Raw PostScript code for example, does not work expect on a PS
device, unless the driver recognizes it and translates it back into 
something more general - provided that feature is supported.

regards, Berthold.








Berthold K.P. Horn	Cambridge, Massachusetts (M)