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Hello Pierre,<br>
<br>
Le 16/04/2011 18:19, Pierre MacKay a écrit :<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DA9C189.3000804@comcast.net" type="cite">Your
detailed response was (in one sense) exactly the sort of thing I
was hoping for, but I am distressed, as obviously you are, by some
of your observations.
<br>
<br>
Immediate relief for my immediate situation came when the online
distiller opened up again, and the Windows instance of Distiller
was silently corrected (which means that Adobe is secretly
invading my system to fix things, and that does not entirely sit
well with me).
<br>
<br>
Why do I use distiller? Because the commercial firms I have to
satisfy won't accept anything else. Moreover, not all PDF is the
same. For example, Ghostscript produces apparently successful PDF
through the various ps2pdf instances, but you cannot display them
in Adobe Reader 7+, because Reader 7+ substitutes blank space for
all the characters in Adobe Expert Encoding. The various direct
to PDF versions of TeX may help, and ultimately I may have to try
them, but the manuals are not reassuring. The correspondence
associated with direct-to-PDF output does not sound as if
refinements such as small caps and old -style figures are of any
more concern to the participants than they are to the "industry"
as you describe it.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I don't quite see what you are expecting: what could pdf/Xe/Lua-TeX
do with respect to small caps and associates? The engines simply
used the fonts they're given; if they support anything related to
fonts, it's so-called microtypography (I'm not sure what the state
of it in XeTeX, though). Otherwise, it's garbage in, garbage out.<br>
<br>
Martin mentionned the fontspec package; it is designed for LaTeX,
though, and I think you use plain TeX. But using modern fonts format
is extremely easy in XeTeX; in LuaTeX you need the luaotfload
package (on which fontspec relies when used with LuaTeX), although
learning to load fonts by yourself is something you might want to
learn; it is achievable.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DA9C189.3000804@comcast.net" type="cite">In
addition, I have looked through the documentation to find any
support for the independent setting of bleedbox and trimbox that
seems to be offered only by a computer resident version of
distiller (not offered by online distiller) and when one makes up
a cover with a solid color underlay, printers insist on a bleedbox
18pt outside the trim box all round to insure against white
hairlines at the edge of the cover. I could force this code into a
PDF that didn't have it through a perl script, but it would be
rather a bear to do, and Adobe Reader does have the virtue that it
shows you that trimbox is entirely inside bleedbox with a discrete
green line that is not part of the PDF.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
The \pdfpageattr token list lets you add properties to a Page object
(\pdfpagesattr -- note the <i>s</i> -- does that for all pages at
once, i.e. Pages), including /BleedBox, /TrimBox, etc. There are
many PDF functionalities that pdfTeX don't support directly because
(I suppose that's a reason) there are just too many of them and they
can be easily added to the proper dictionary by hand with a
\special-like command.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DA9C189.3000804@comcast.net" type="cite">Free
font development would be nice but, as you say, it is rarely done
to anything like the standards that some of the older Type1
packages maintained. One of the problems that shows up again and
again is completely random set-widths. In one once-touted Greek
package I found /alpha, /alphaacute, /alphagrave, and
/alphaperispomene each with different widths, the most extreme
pairs reaching nearly a point in difference. That really shows up
in densely set text. (It took me nearly four years to refine
Ibycus to even its present imperfect level.)
<br>
<br>
I recently had the pleasure of setting a long text in Bruce
Rogers's Centaur, and I doubt that any free clone will ever come
near the elegance Rogers put into that. It may be the finest
single font ever produced in the United States. Centaur is not a
good screen display font, but it seems grossly wasteful of quality
to dump it forever just for that limitation.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I once considered buying Rogers's Bible; but then I saw the price
tag, and decided I should remain an atheist...<br>
<br>
I think Centaur is well-preserved by its quasi-mythical status, and
I'm sure you can find it in many a sword-and-sorcery novel (probably
not the worst way to use it). Instead, I'm worried by what appears
to me as a lack of interest in modern fonts in book publishing (not
advertising), as if literacy should be emphasized by Renaissance.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4DA9C189.3000804@comcast.net" type="cite">Perhaps,
as you suggest, luatex may provide a way of holding on to the good
fonts from the past. When I get out from under my present
backlog, I shall look into it, and be very grateful to you and
luatex for the assstance.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
The LuaTeX way as I understand it isn't just adding a fancy
programming language to a venerable tool; nor is it simply going
modern with Unicode and True/OpenType (although that is a quite goal
in itself); it is maximum control on the finest details, among which
typographic ones, and that is why it is, in my opinion, so good and
so in line with the philosophy of TeX. (That's also why I can't help
talking about it.)<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Paul<br>
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