Re: ps2pk vs. gsftopk

[mackay@cs.washington.edu (Pierre MacKay)]

This is a good opportunity for me to confirm that I have used all sorts
of non-standard encoding vectors, including one that I am making up
for polytonic accented Greek, with really loooooonng names.  

/omegaasperperispomeneisub

and the like.  I have never had any problem with any encoding vector
that was acceptable to the PostScript system.  ps2pk has taken them
all so far.  

Secondly, I have absolutely no complaints with ps2pk handling of
t1 rasterization.  I use it only for the screen, where in xdvi it
gives images of very satisfactory clarity.  It is entirely possible
that I am using ghostscript in an inadequately sophisticated way, but
if I take a text in timesroman and display it at near normal size in
xdvi using ps2pk, I can actually read the contents.  If I pass the
same text through dvips and read it in a gs display, I can read
no more than half the content, and that only when I have a pretty 
good idea what it is going to say. 

I don't know whether that is more a tribute to the ps2pk rasterizing
engine or to xdvi itself, but I like the combination.  
Maybe gsftopk fonts look better in xdvi than in gs.  There was a
while when the old SunWindow program dvipage seemed to have the edge
on managing bitmap fonts on the screen, but xdvi seems now to have
risen to the same quality.

A separate consideration.  I have been out of the loop for a week or so,
and don't know how the discussion of psfonts.map vs PSRESources is
going.  I have taken the opportunity to look through the Display
Postscript book in the interim, and i don't see that PSRES is an
adequate substitute for psfonts.map, which allows more than just fontname
mapping and encoding.  It also allows 

".167 SlantFont"
"1.2 ExtendFont"
"/PaintType 2 store"

and if these can be managed in PSRES, it is certainly not made clear how.,

I haven't tried it, but it wouldn't surprise me if other simple def's
could be stored too.  

I use all these features.  Not all the time, but it is the special
occasions that count.

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