Re: Viewer competence

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

At 5:23 pm +0000 29/11/99, Berthold K.P. Horn wrote:
>At 02:57 PM 11/29/1999 +0100, Laurent SIEBENMANN wrote:
[snip]

>As for Type 1, any viewer using Adobe Type Manager (ATM)
>will have good rasterization, and any not using ATM will not.

Not necessarily; MacOS screen bitmaps can be made available in many
different sizes, and can get round this problem.

>As for TrueType, any using the rasterizer in Windows or the
>one in the Mac OS will do as good a job as the font allows.
>Which, for fonts other than the core fonts from MS, Apple,
>and some MonoType fonts, is not very much.

This is, I'm afraid, utter hooey.  I have Truetype founts which, in my
view, print on my printer with higher quality than equivalent PS Type 1
founts.  Take, for example, the CM founts in the BaKoMa TT and the
BSR/Y&Y/AMS PS Type 1 versions: when printed on my HP DW 520, the BaKoMa TT
founts look very much closer to Knuth's intention (as seen printed in the
TeXbook and his other publications) than the ATM rendered BSR/Y&Y/AMS PS
Type 1 versions.  These PS Type 1 founts are rendered very badly at some
sizes - an `Fr' combination in cmr has the glyphs visibly touching at some
sizes, for example.  There are other examples of poor quality that I could
give, which the BaKoMa TT founts do not display.  (The Truetype rendering
being done by the TT engine built into MacOS 7.6.1)

(of course Berthold disagrees with me, but that's because he's got a
commercial connection with a firm that makes money selling PS Type 1 founts
and wants everyone to use ATM and buy them...  Me?  I'm just a fussy LaTeX
user who cares about getting the best practical output quality and not a
lot else)

I've got many shareware founts in TT and PS Type 1 versions and in most
cases I can see very little difference in output when printed as described
above.  In some cases, the TT version is superior to the PS Type 1 version,
but there's not much to choose between them most of the time.

[snip]

>PK fonts restrict you to fixed magnification, so aren't very
>general purpose...

Eh?

Rowland.