TeX on Easy Street

[laurent@math.toronto.edu (Larry Siebenmann)]

Here is question of Raymond S'eroul.

 > Laurent, j'ai une question importante concernant
 > Textures : peut-on utiliser des polices 'Multiple
 > Master' d'Adobe avec Textures ?
 > 
 > Idee naive : on transforme en police de type I une
 > instantiation (mais cela a-t-iol un sens ?), puis on
 > utilise Ed Metrics pour obtenir le tfm.
 > 
 > J'ai pose la question a Yannis, qui ne sait pas ; a
 > Blue Sky, qui n'a jamais essaye. Et toi, sauras-tu ?
 > 
 > En tous cas, cela me parait tres important pour
 > l'avenir de Textures.

I do not have a solid answer, but since the question
is obviously important, I am posting it.

I have an idea that one might be able to make work
without creating new conventions.

Adobe MM (multi-master) fonts (serif and non-serif) are
*designed* to substitute for other fonts that are
for some reason unusable for the moment.

TeX viewer programmers could and should
therefore endeavor to have MM fonts sub in for
unavailable type 1 fonts.  And in conditions that 
tap multi-master talents to produce good results.

This is what happens most often in the Acrobat viewer
when something has gone wrong with a type1 font
compilation.  I am sure it happens according to a 
standard Adobe protocol.  But published where?, available
in which environments?  As for where, I guess the 
answer is "under the most recent ATM, available 
under the Mac Sys 7.5 and Windows 95".

It is the sort of thing that might start happening
without TeX viewer programmers lifting a finger. Is it
happening already today outside of Acrobat?? This is
worth work to help along; Courier substitutions are
dreadful.

When this is accomplished we will probably find that by
TeX-setting with *any* standardly encoded font with
reasonably normal metric properties and deleting most of
each font pfb, the MM mechanism will click in and
provide readible and sometimes handsome text.

To what purpose?  Highly efficient TeX-composed literary
publications could be posted publicly on Easy Street.
(Maybe 1Ko per page for ".dvi" format and 3Ko per page for
".pdf".)

     Comments?

        Laurent Siebenmann

PS.  I recall Nelson Beebe announcing the MM in 1989(??)
Finally Adobe has done its bit; the rest is probably up to
us.