Adrain What a wonderfully informative posting - I was kind of hoping my ill-informed mumblings would provoke an expert response! Font design is something that seems to raise passionate debate in whatever context it's mentioned. I'm not wild about Helvetica or even Palatino, but then again like you said, we're somewhat limited unless we go out and pay serious money for our own fonts. So let me get this straight, the process you've outlined below for this Mantinia font would be different to say, GillSanserif (one of my favourites) or something? So there's no chance someone could do a perl script that would help with the majority of it? And thus my hopes of being able to use my friend's large-ish collection of proprietary type 1 fonts with latex is really nothing more than an ill-researched pipe dream? Assuming that I could use them, as he got them for his work on Macs, but I suspect even this much is doubtful. How sad! But maybe it's worth it for one or two choice fonts... k. On Thursday, October 26, 2000 4:26 PM, Adrian Burd [SMTP:adrian@halodule.tamu.edu] wrote:

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"Kester" == Kester Clegg writes:

Kester> On Thursday, October 26, 2000 10:28 AM, Corvin Russell Kester> [SMTP:corvinr@sympatico.ca] wrote: >> large book collection. Anyhow, it would surprise me to find >> much use of extended bold outside of display/advertising >> typesetting. When you combine the spindly, weightless Computer >> Modern

Kester> spindly? weightless? Sounds to me like you've been Kester> brought up on Times Roman - a font weighted to conteract Kester> excessively absorbant 19th century paper.

Hmmm....I'm not sure this is quite right. Times Roman (or more correctly Times New Roman) was designed in the early 1930's under the guidance of Stanley Morison. As far as I know, the first time it appeared in "The Times" was October 3rd 1932 (see Lawson's book referenced below). It didn't gain a great deal of use in America because of the mechanisms for newspaper production. "The Times" was unique in that it's newsprint was considerably whiter (and thus more expensive) than that used by other newspapers and as a result, the paper carried more ink than others. The newsprint by other printers was cheaper than that used by "The Times".

A good discussion of the history and use of the font is found in Alexander Lawson's "Anatomy of a Typeface".

Kester> cmr is part of the hallowed mf family, it is a very high Kester> quality font which scales correctly even at huge Kester> proportions, unlike tt and even type 1 fonts.

This is due to the differences between the way metafont describes fonts and the ways that Type-1 and True-type do. Many in the TeX community regard CMR as a very good font that, as almost all fonts do, has limitations and problems (see discussions on comp.tex.tex for example). Metafont (or mf) is a programming language for designing fonts. It is, as most of Knuth's products are, and excellent program. Unfortunately, it is a programming language and it doesn't produce fonts that can be easily used by Postscript code for example. It is more common to find fonts designed by graphical programs such as Fontographer or FontLab; these however do not (AFAIK) produce metafont code.

Kester> is the times package for all to use, but I think it looks Kester> damn ugly when you can have the infinitely more elegant Kester> cmr by default.

"...infintely more elegant..."? Hmmm, not sure I would agree with this, nor would many who are professional typographers and type-designers. Computer Modern is a very good font (look who Knuth was talking to when he designed it, Zapf and Carter among others) but it has its limitations.

Kester> The only packages in fact which have Kester> tempted me are palatino and helvetica, the latter of which Kester> is nice for less formal ocassions.

Palatino is an excellent font, designed by one of the greatest type designers of the last (and this) century - Hermann Zapf. Zapf also designed Euler for the AMS and the two work nicely together. If you need a lighter font that is similar in design (i.e., heavily calligraphic) then Aldus and Zapf Rennaisance are also excellent. Helvietica is generally frowned upon by professionals becuase of its over-use. There are other excellent sans-serif alternatives that add interest and colour to a page.

Kester> I still think that a decent front-end enabling new fonts Kester> to be installed and used in latex is desperately needed, Kester> even if only for those hobbiest amongst us daft enough to Kester> typeset pictures and text with latex!

Some of us have been doing so for the last 20 years or more!

Kester> I'd love it if CTAN Kester> offered packages like 'RoosterHeavy' or 'Monotype Corsiva' Kester> which were everything you needed; scripts, fonts, afm / Kester> tfm files, etc, etc, and just let you unzip and install, Kester> and include the package name in the \usepackage{} Kester> declaration. That would make my life so much easier!!

Ummm...I don't know about RoosterHeavy, but MT-Corsiva is, as most high quality fonts are, a proprietary product. People such as Hermann Zapf, Mathew Carter and others make their living by designing high quality fonts. As a result, I doubt that you will EVER see such a font on any CTAN site. Most fonts can be purchased from respectable foundries for varying fees (whole families can be purchsed from Adobe for as little as $30, others cost far more). These will give you (for Type-1 fonts) the afm, pfm, and pfb files. From these, you can construct interfaces for dvips, latex etc. using fontinst.

There are many reasons why this is not a simple task. One of them is that font encodings are not always standard. For example, I recently purchased Carter's Mantinia font. This is a titling font with a large number of unique and unusual ligatures and alternative characters. One has to create a detailed and unique encoding file in order for TeX and dvips to be able to find the correct glyphs. Fortunately, Alan Hoenig had done most of the work on this one (see "TeX Unbound" by Alan Hoenig) though I did end up changing things a little according to my taste.

Kester> But I love latex for the sheer quality of its output,

The output from LaTeX and TeX is regarded as being good quality mainly because of the uniform colour that it produces. This results from the excellent line breaking algorithm it uses.

Adrian

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