On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 03:05:57PM -0400, Zvezdan Petkovic wrote:
> 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.
Be an interesting challenge for my French ;)
>
> 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.
Well, this isn't quite true.
a) type 3 != bitmap. But the type 3 fonts generated by metafont are
bitmap, so that is correct here. Probably you already knew that.
b) bitmap @ (say) 600dpi, does *not* mean it looks ugly on screen.
For example, consider the output of dvips (at 600dpi) viewed in gv.
Looks absolutely fine. The fault lies entirely with acroread, which
is /very/ bad at displaying bitmaps (it's anti-aliasing/supersampling
algorithm is horrible for bitmaps). Try running gv on your pdfs, and
they will look much nicer.
c) bitmap does not mean it looks bad printed, either. After all,
printers are bitmap devices. It just means you need a compatible
resolution (either the correct one, or an integer multiple of the
correct one). So you do need to know (guess) the output resolution at
the time the fonts are rasterised to bitmaps.
>
> 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.
True. Although I've been told by some people that some of these type
1s aren't really brilliant. They look OK to me.
>
> I find it very important to have a readable PDF on the screen. I'm
Of course. But I argue it's adobe that's the main problem here, not
the technology.
Jules
