At 11:31 97-04-18, Robin Fairbairns wrote: > Hans Aberg writes: >Suppose you have a type1 font that offers all the glyphs you need. >What is the (efficiency) advantage to making a composite virtual font, >rather than simply using what you've got? In my experience (almost >exclusively typesetting Latin-script text) the automatically-generated >8r encoding of type1 gives me all I need. > >In such a case, it's a ludicrous *waste* of effort to create a new >virtual font: unless you're wandering into typesetting of languages >that aren't covered by 8r, to do such a thing would be ridiculously >*in*efficient. I have all the time spoken about the math fints issue, where you always tend to run out of symbols. Are you discussing the text fonts all the time? :-) >Michael Downes remarked that linear scaling is bad when the sizes get >really small, which only really happens in maths; you then responded >that we need a "bit of work" to add meta-ness to the existing fonts, >and I responded to suggest that the "bit" was more likely to involve >armies of designers and metafont hackers. I knew intuitively that optical scaling is important in math, especially for all those scriptsscripts, which it is really nice if you can use without restriction in a math paper. Michael Downes made this precise, by remarking, in effect, that it makes only a difference for those scriptscripts (if your paper is in 10 pt); otherwise not. It makes any difference, I did not know this, so I fekt it was very interesting information myself. >> In fact there seems to be two wholly different discussion topics going on >> here: > >I.e., you actually _knew_ all the above... In general, I try to avoid polemics, so even if I put up some stuff, and somebody would misunderstand what I try to say, and puts up a polemic "correction", I would normally not bother following up on that. :-) Basically it is what facts come up in the end, that is important. Hans Aberg