[OS X TeX] Warning about new Latin Modern when converted to the Mac

Gerben Wierda Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl
Sun Mar 20 23:21:57 CET 2005


The new Latin Modern (converted to Mac format) has a weird effect on a 
Mac. According to one specialist:

The Cap-Height of this font is 681. The ascender (from 'hhea' table) is
694. My understanding is that TextEdit will draw the baseline 694
em-units from the top of the field. That means that you've only got 14
em-units above H (which will not even be a pixel in a 12 point font).

I believe this is a flaw in the font ('hhea'.ascent should be the
maximum value of the bounding box -- but here it is considerably smaller
than the bounding box value). And a minor flaw in Apple's font mechanism
-- the bounding box should not be used to determine the line spacing of
a font.

Interestingly Adobe tried to correct this with OpenType, including two
new values, a new bounding box, and a set of typographic values too.
Sadly windows apps all ignore the typographic values and continue the
stupid use of the bounding box.

G

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