Re: Using TeX fonts in lout

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Sat, Mar 25, 2000 at 09:11:56AM +0100, Tamas Papp wrote:

> Maybe the question is a bit stupid, because I still don't understand
> what Metafont, pk font and generic font stand for.

Even if this was intended as proactive defensive rethoric...  no, I
wouldn't call it a stupid question.  Perhaps Norm Walsh old pages at

    <http://www.nwalsh.com/fonts/>

will be helpful.  They served me well when I was learning this
stuff and when they were still actively maintained.



> Is there an easy way to convert them into PostScript fonts?

The short answer is 'no', not in generic case at least.


MetaFont is a very different and I dare say unique approach to fonts.
The "meta" part of the name is there for a reason.

MetaFont is an attempt to "comprehend harmony with algebra".  I have
to confess that I have a pirate printout of "The MetaFont Book" made
from the sources available from CTAN.  Naturally, that printout
doesn't have a single illustration that the authentic book has.  But,
in some sense, I belive that that's the way the MF book should be
read, without a single picture, to integrate the algebraic approach to
harmony of types explained in the book and the process of reading the
book.  Huh, I guess that's what they call post-modernism.  But I
digressed.

Among other things Knuth capitalizes on the fact that type doesn't
scale linearly but instead scales "optically".  This is well know
fact, but scaleable type technologies (Type1, TrueType, F3 &c) don't
really support optical scaling between different point sizes, though
this changed with Adobe's Multiple Master where you can specify
piecewise linear instead of linear scale.  Lout only supports linearly
scalable type (i.e. the metrics are also scaled linearly).

There are versions of CM available in T1 and TTF, but I belive they
are derived from some specific instance (perhaps at 10 or 12pt) and
they obey the linear rules of T1/TTF, thus they are not meta-fonts
anymore.  

MF is a rasterizer, it targets bitmaps.  So "generic fonts" (gf) and
"packed fonts" (pk) are just different ways of specifying bitmap
fonts.


> I'd like to ask whether it's possible to use TeX's fonts in lout,
> and if it is, then how.

Change lout to PostScript and go to the Norm Walsh fonts pages.


SY, Uwe
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