Re: Computer Modern Fonts (More...)

[Reimer Behrends]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 06:27:24PM -0700, Salman Khilji wrote:
[...]
> 1)  I chose LtLatin1.LCM as the mapping.  Is this correct?  I don't know what 
> a mapping is and I don't know if what I chose is correct.  Can someone who 
> has already experimented with Computer Modern Fonts please email me their 
> fontdefs.ld file.

Any lout file is essentially a string of 8-bit bytes. The mapping (or
more conventionally, encoding) translates a byte to the name of a
character (and also provides some information about which characters
are upper- and lowercase, etc.). Look at the LtLatin1.LCM file for
an example. Usually, in western countries, LtLatin1.LCM works
reasonably well for most purposes.

> 2)  Notice that in the above example uses cmitt10.afm file.  For the cmitt10 
> case, we only are provided a design font size of 10---so we end up using 
> this.  For another example such as cmmi, we are provided cmmi5.pfb, 
> cmmi6.pfb, cmmi7.pfb, cmmi8.pfb, cmmi9.pfb, and cmmi10.pfb.

When you need fonts at different sizes, you ideally want to scale the
stems and the hairlines differently. This cannot be done automatically;
the fonts have to be designed that way. Usually, commercial fonts
provide at best a text size and a display size. The CMR fonts go out of
their (via Metafont) to give you a slightly different design for each
font size. For most purposes, however, people won't notice if you just
use, say, the 10 point variant and scale it as needed.

> Which one shall 
> I use in the @Metrics section above?  I suppose since Type1 format is 
> resizalbe, we could simply choose one size and discard all the other, right?  

Type 1 fonts are scalable, but each of the above fonts has its own
metrics, because each has its own design (they may still be sufficiently
similar, but I wouldn't bet on it).

> Or shall we have a separate entry for each size?  I tried to cheat here and 
> thought I could create a separate @FonDef entry for each size but I was 
> surprised that Lout was not happy having a number in the @Family tag above. 

Generally, lout only allows you to have @ and upper- and lower-case
letters in tokens (I'm somewhat oversimplifying here, but you get the
idea).

[...]

                        Reimer Behrends