Re: Viewer competence

[Rowland <rebecca@astrid.u-net.com>]

At 1:57 pm +0000 29/11/99, Laurent SIEBENMANN wrote:
>Which DVI viewers do a good job of handling
>all of
>
> --- pk fonts
> --- PS Type 1 fonts
> --- PS Type 3 fonts
> --- TrueType fonts
> --- virtual fonts based on all the above
>
>(And if you feel exuberant tell us
>just how good is the job they do!)

It depends what you mean by `good'...  OzTeX I can tell you about: it can
handle any fount format that the MacOS can handle, as well as PKs.
Truetype founts are rendered by the MacOS's internal Truetype rendering
engine; PS Type 1 founts can be rendered by ATM (which is now available for
free from Adobe so no worries there).  Dunno about PS Type 3 founts; I
think that OzTeX can handle them but can only display MacOS screen bitmaps
on screen, which means the results will look pretty ropey at arbitrary
magnifications.  VFs based on anything work fine.

(OzTeX doesn't come with tools to extract metric information from `foreign'
founts, so unless you can get afms for any given `foreign' fount, setting
(La)TeX up to use such founts isn't practical with OzTeX alone)

OzTeX does a pretty good job of dithering PKs if you ask me; I tend to
prefer its dithered PKs to ATM smoothed PS Type 1s on screen when it comes
to the CM family.  I seem to be in a bit of a minority on this, though.
The screen display of Truetype founts is whatever the MacOS version you
have gives you: current versions of the MacOS (I gather) smooth using
greyscale similarly to ATM working on PS Type 1 founts; System 7.6.1 (and
below - what I use) certainly don't.  If you're using OzTeX under System
6.0.8 or below (and yes, some people do), you need to add the Truetype
extension to use Truetype founts, and you also need to acquire an ancient
version of ATM if you want nicely rendered PS Type 1 founts on screen.

One drawback of OzTeX's dvi viewer (and its QuickDraw printing engine) is
that it can't do proper re-encoding; it can re-map glyphs from one numbered
slot to another, but if a glyph doesn't exist in a fount's default
encoding, OzTeX doesn't allow you to use it.  (OzTeX does come with dvips,
so if you're using that for PS output you *can* have proper re-encoding;
not that helps you for screen display directly, of course).

Rowland.