[math-font-discuss] Ugly drawn rules in Adobe Reader

[Johannes Kuester]

Dear all (well, Taco and Karl mainly),

one problem I do see with a \mathrulechar character is a heavier 
fraction bar (as it is used mainly in schoolbooks, to make clear which 
is the main fraction bar of stacked fractions etc.). How could this be 
handled? Vertical scaling?

Another problem: Now the rule is drawn exactly to the desired width
(of radicand, over-/underlined character, numerator / denomitar)
How could this be handled? Maybe by overlapping the mathrulechar with 
itself accordingly?

Making the mathrulechar very narrow might not help here, as it might 
lead to other rendering problems: the glyph needs an overlap of about 10 
units (in Type 1), otherwise a bar might appear dashed.

Taco Hoekwater wrote:
 >
 > Karl Berry wrote:
 >
 >> So in practice some \newfam would have to be defined, right?  Since
 >> obviously no existing fonts have this character.
 >
 > Right, but for e.g. the newmath encoding and Latin-Modern math, such
 > a character could be included right from the start.

Yes, of course we could include a codepoint in newmath, and I could 
include it in LatinModern Math.

Another possibility to handle these bars (and some other extensibles as 
well) would be "Type 1 on demand"
(where TeX calculates the necessary glyph dimensions in its first pass, 
then a special font is created, and the glyphs are inserted in TeX's 
second pass). I think something like this has been done for Arab math 
typesetting, and I expect that it wouldn't be very difficult to 
implement with LatinModern Math and MetaType1,
but quite certainly this will never be available for all math fonts.


Johannes


-- 
Johannes Kuester
typoma

mailto:jk at typoma.com
http://www.typoma.com