On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 07:57:12AM +0100, Jules Bean wrote:
>
> > I do not consider seriously Metafont fonts since they are ugly,
> > starting with Computer Modern. Euler is a notable exception because
> > it was designed by Herman Zapf, of course. But it's available as
> > Type1 font in teTeX too.
>
> There's nothing fundamentally ugly about metafont fonts. It can be
> argued that they're a more sophisticated font technology than Type 1,
> despite predating it. Of course, if you think the CM family is ugly,
> that's something else, and fair enough. You're not alone there
> (although I don't agree with you).
>
That's exactly what I meant. CM family is ugly. Notice what I say above
about Euler. Metafont itself is not an issue. It's a design. CM was
designed by one of the greatest computer scientist off all time, but
only a would-be artist. Euler is designed by one of the greatest
designers of all time -- Herman Zapf. That's what makes a difference.
Frankly, when I began using LaTeX long time ago, I thought that CM is a
nice font. At least, it looked better to me than Times. However, the
more I learnt about fonts the more I disliked it. I'm not a font
designer, but I have read some books and talked to some people who know
something about it. The general conclusion is that CM is not the
greatest achievement in type art. Still, if I had to choose between CM
and Times I'd use CM, for some reason. Since I have other choices I
rather use something else depending on the type of writing.
IEEE Transactions switched a few years ago to Palatino (Herman Zapf
design again) from Times. I was quite happy about that. Palatino was also
available in the default teTeX installation and I use it quite often. It
looks great in combination with Euler for math.
For less scientific kind of writing one can try Garamond, or one of the
new beautiful fonts -- Minion. There were two excellent articles a few
years ago in _Cahier GUTenberg_ (a journal of a French TeX user's
group), by Thierry Bouche on the topic of math fonts and multi-master
Minion fonts in TeX.
http://www.gutenberg.eu.org/pub/GUTenberg/publications/publis.html
Follow the links for Cahiers 25 and 26 and Thierry's articles.
I remember seeing at least one of these translated in English and
published in TUGboat too (http://www.tug.org).
> > The importance of using Type1 cannot be overemphasised since it
> > is the only way to produce a decent PDF. I hope you'll agree that
> > the ability to produce a good looking PDF is the most important
> > feature of any typesetting program nowadays.
>
> Point of information: Metafont fonts produce perfectly decent PDFs
> (although, admittedly, PDFS best suited to particular resolutions,
> since there is no way of embedding the 'outline' version of the
> metafont into the PDF, it has to be a particular resolution
> version). Acrobat reader simply fails to display them in a remotely
> pleasant way: this may be related to the fact that Adobe make money
> selling type 1 fonts. You'll note that they print fine.
>
I know that. When I say decent PDF I mean the PDF read from the screen.
The printed page looks fine if you have a decent 600dpi printer.
However, on a less good printer even the printed page won't look fine.
The reason is that PDF format embeds them as Type3 fonts, which
basically boils down to bitmaps. Hence, low resolution (as on screen or
bad printer) amounts to a bad quality.
Fortunately, teTeX comes with all Metafont fonts in a Type1 version too.
If one changes a single line in $TEXMFPATH/dvips/config/updmap from
false to true, one can get Type1 used for CM, Euler, etc. by default.
I find it very important to have a readable PDF on the screen. I'm
subscribed to both IEEE Computer Society and ACM digital libraries. I
don't like printing so many articles (saves some trees I guess :-).
I suppose people would begin reading my own articles off the screen at
first. They might just as well dismiss them if they are unreadable,
rather than decide to print them. Telling them that they look quite well
when printed is simply not good enough. We are responsible for
presentation of our work in any form. If it looks bad on screen, people
might get the impression that we didn't make an effort to make it look
better.
Hence, having a good-looking PDF on screen is an imperative. Hence Type1
fonts. I hope I made my point more clearly now. :-)
Finally, I would agree with you that Metafont is a fine technology, but
Type1 has become de facto standard for printing industry.
Best regards,
--
Zvezdan Petkovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.cs.wm.edu/~zvezdan/
