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Re: MF hackery (arrow kit)


> Ulrik, I have applied your patches to ymearr.mf and added some more.
> The diff below is against pristine 0.54. 

Thanks, I'll have a closer look at your changestonight at home.


[ zero_width chars ]

> I have tried |zero_width|, but that did not correctly center the 
> glyph. Now I use an explicit |adjust_fit| to cancel the width.

Should be fine, if it solves the problem.  However, it would be
interesting to find out why |zero_width| didn't work as expected.

>> * The gaped squiggly arrows produce some stray pixes within the 
>> are that should be erased.  Anyone knows how to fix this???

> Instead of |unfill|ing a box, I now calculate the intersection point
> and draw a shorter spline. This eliminates the stray pixels and gives
> correctly rounded endings.

This sounds like a better approach.  Too bad that Metafont doesn't 
have MetaPost's |cutafter| and |cutbefore| macros.

>> * There are still a few remaining inconsistencies as to when 
>> points are positioned at hround(w-u) or hround(w-u-eps), etc.

> I have ignored these for now.

Maybe I'll have another look at these.  There should be some simple
guiding principle when to use them if you look closely enough.

[ dot_sep in dotted arrows ]

> This turned out to be a bit tricky. We cannot guarantee uniform
> spacing between the dots without sacrificing device-independence,
> so I increased the space between the dots a bit, making the 
> nonuniformity much less prominent. This is only a problem for
> low resolutions, it was quite noticeable at 300dpi, but invisible
> at 900dpi.

OK, as I see that you've used 6 dots per 12u, which makes 9 dots 
per 18u, of which 3 dots would be deleted in the gapped versions.
Sounds reasonable.  Remaining question:  Is it the right approach 
to have dotted arrows rather than dashed ones in the first place?

>> * I haven't yet checked if all the arrows (apparently assembled
>> from various sources) follow the design principles of Knuth's
>> latest sources or if some of them are still based on old CM.

> I haven't done anything about this.

I'll also have a look at these.

> All |italcorr| statements have been removed.

Seems reasonable for an unslanted symbol font.

[ CM square bracktes ]

> I was surprised by the difference between the mf programs for the
> brackets and floors in punct.mf and symbol.mf. While the brackets 
> are very sophisticated, the floors are almost trivial. Is this
> because the brackets are designed for text fonts, while the floors
> are not ?

I suppose so.  Maybe we should leave the text brackets alone and
design new math brackets based on the design of floors/ceilings.

So long, Ulrik.


P.S.  At the moment I have a couple of projects in the pipeline, 
none of which is ready for distribution yet, but the following
is upcoming.  Please don't rush the next release.

* A `mmaptm' installation kit (similar to `mathptm') for the 
  old encodings using Times with Mathematica symbol fonts.  
  (Documentation still being written.)

* An incomplete Times/Mathematica installation of MC/MSP/MS1/MS2.
  (Some .mtx files need updating to account for missing glyphs.)

* Revised .etx files mostly based on .afm symbol names from the 
  Blue Sky CM/AMS fonts.  (This will require changes to some of
  the glyph names in the ym[acd].mf sources as well.  In addition,
  it may be useful to have .mtx files to handle the difficiult
  cases when the Blue Sky names and Lucida names don't agree.)

* Some reshuffling of symbols in  MC and MSP/MS1 to better take
  advantage of the symbols available in Mathematica fonts.

* Several unfinished discussion papers.