On Tuesday 15 October 2002 01:27 pm, Jody Harris wrote:
On Tue, 2002-10-15 at 10:44, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
There's much more to designing a good font than that. I'm no fan of MS, but they do do some things right (occassionally, and I'm sure by accident). Here's a good article on fonts:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/default.htm
I guess I'm not sure if you are saying there is more to designing fonts specifically for computers, or in general. I know there's a lot to the proper form of the fonts, and some fonts scale, and others have outlines. I'll have to admit I don't know a lot about these things. Are you suggesting that the mechanics of creating the actulal glyph cannot be separated from the underlying technology, or that there is a lot to know about the shapes, geometry, leading, ascent, advance, descent, point size, and all that stuff?
In particular: http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/xmbdfed.html http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/
I hadn't looked into those documents, but I'll spend some quality time with them now.
What I'm finding very frustrating is that I can't get a good answere as to what fonts I should have installed in order to use Mathematica, and the associated documentation which ships with it. I'd be willing to pay a few bucks for the correct set of fonts. I may even own a license of these. I've the feeling Micorsoft are doing some kind of substitution for the Helvetica named in the Mathematica documentation, which isn't happening in the Linux distribution. I'm pretty sure you can use Microsoft fonts on a Linux box. I know you can use some of them, I'm doing it. I copied them directly off the NTFS partition. Part of the problem is that the name Helvetica is a trade mark, and therefore cannot legally be used by vendors without paying the licensing fee. That may be why I'm having such a hard time getting direct and useful answers from people.
Jody Harris
STH -- Hatton's Law: There is only One inviolable Law