Re: LaTeX and word processing
- From: Tak To <takto@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:48 -0400
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Sep 6, 4:29 pm, Odysseus <odysseus1479...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:In article
<6919c27f-456f-4a8a-892a-417f76404...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
DKleinecke <dkleine...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip>
[... Donald Knuth] never once mentions any standard authority onFrom the preface to _Computer Modern Typefaces_ (1986):
Typographic Style. But you never know. Knuth prides himself on his
superior expository techniques and his teaching style. As with every
highly polished presentation a lot of inconvenient details get
smoothed over. We are never told how he learned what he learned.
"The task of obtaining satisfactory typefaces with parametric variations
has turned out to be much, much more difficult than I ever imagined when
I began this work in 1977. But I've had the advantage of expert help;
indeed, it has been my good fortune to make the acquaintance of several
of the world's finest type designers, who have unselfishly given me a
great deal of tutelage. At first I was blissfully unaware of the
subtleties of the subject, because such things have rarely been
described in print; when I completed the first 'Computer Modern
proto-type' in January 1980, I had been almost entirely self-taught,
although I had spent much time in libraries looking for clues. Then in
February of 1980, I had the great pleasure of demonstrating the first
experimental METAFONT system to Hermann Zapf, who worked intensively
with me for two weeks as we improved many of the character shapes. He
taught me many things I was able to use during the succeeding months. In
1981, I made several hundred specimen sheets of the fonts as they
existed then, and I was privileged to receive detailed critiques of
these specimens from Zapf in Germany as well as from Matthew Carter in
England, and Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in America. Then Richard
Southall came to Stanford during the month of April 1982, and we made
extensive changes, especially to the sans-serif letters (for which he
contributed a brand-new design). These changes spawned a completely new
METAFONT language, which incorporated many ideas of Zapf, Bigelow, and
Southall. Finally, the Computer Modern programs were rewritten again, in
terms of the new METAFONT; the final draft, made during the spring of
1985, benefited greatly from detailed criticisms by Southall and Carter,
as well as by N. N. Billawala, who also contributed a new design of the
calligraphic letters. It is clear that I did not suffer from lack of
expert assistance!"
It gets worse and worse.
Zapf OR Carter OR Bigelow & Holmes (I don't know who Southall is)
could have created superb faces. But to throw them all together into a
single hodgepodge? Is _that_ where the monster called "Computer
Modern" was spawned?
Knuth did not ask these designers to design type faces, he
asked them to help him write the program Metafont, which
generates a family of fonts from a set of parameters.
From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAFONT
"One of the characteristics of Metafont is that all of the
shapes of the glyphs are defined with geometrical equations,
e.g., one can define a given point to be the intersection
of a line segment and a Bézier cubic.
"Unlike more common outline font formats (such as TrueType
or PostScript Type 1), a Metafont font is primarily made up
of strokes with finite-width "pens", along with filled
regions. Thus, rather than describing the outline of the
glyph directly, a Metafont file describes the pen paths. Some
simpler Metafont fonts, such as the calligraphic mathematics
fonts in the Computer Modern family, use a single pen stroke
with a relatively large pen to define each visual "stroke"
of the glyphs. More complex fonts such as the Roman text
fonts in the Computer Modern family use a small pen to trace
around the outline of the visual "strokes", which are then
filled; the result is much like an outline font, but with
slightly softened corners defined by the pen shape.
"Since the font shapes are defined by equations rather than
directly-coded numbers, it is possible to treat parameters
such as aspect ratio, font slant, stroke width, serif size,
and so forth as input parameters in each glyph definition
(which then define not a single font, but a meta-font). Thus,
by changing the value of one of these parameters at one
location in the Metafont file, one can produce a consistent
change throughout the entire font. Computer Modern Roman
illustrates many uses of this feature; a typical TeX
installation includes a number of versions of the font in
sizes from 5pt to 17pt, with the stroke widths the same in
all sizes (rather than increasing as the font is scaled up)
and aspect ratios widening in the smaller sizes for increased
legibility. In addition, the Computer Modern typewriter and
sans-serif fonts are defined using essentially the same
Metafont file as the Roman font, but with different global
parameters.
....
"While well-known font designers, such as Hermann Zapf, have
collaborated with Knuth to create new fonts using Metafont,
the system has not been widely adopted by professional type
designers. Knuth attributes this to the fact that "asking an
artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how
to write a font with 60 parameters is too much".
Tak
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