Re: fontname postfixes

[Rebecca and Rowland <rebecca@astrid.u-net.com>]

At 11:44 am +0000 23/2/99, Berthold Horn wrote:
>Hi:
>
>At 04:01 1999-02-23 +0000, Rebecca and Rowland wrote:
[snip]

>A small example of what I am talking about is ltxnews, which in one
>version at least
>come out using EC fonts.  The assumption being that everyone should have them
>and everyone should use them.  Since they do not exist in "PS T1" format
>this is
>a bad assumption.

It's a bad assumption to make, but not because the EC founts don't exist in
PS Type 1 format (anyway, I thought there was a PS Type 1 version of the EC
founts now?)

The problem is not that the founts aren't available in a particular form,
but that you can't assume that every LaTeX installation has anything but
the straightforward OT1 encoded Computer Modern founts.

[snip]

>Suppose for example, the LaTeX developers went in a direction that made it
>impossible to run things with OzTeX on the Mac.  Presumably you would
>speak up before that went on too long  :-)

Erm...  No, there's not much I can do about it.  Rather a lot of LaTeX
stuff depends on PostScript, and that's that - I can't use it unless I get
a PostScript printer.

>>Well...  Since Unix people don't have access to ATM, who can blame them for
>>this misconception?
>
>There are rasterizers available for X Windows that make it equally
>possible to work with "PS T1" fonts without ever using PostScript
>(It's not clear why this hasn't caught on more).

[snip]

It seems pretty obvious to me: using PostScript has plenty of advantages,
and Ghostscript can be set up as an output filter to render PS for any
printer you happen to have.  Since this is the case, why muck around with
anything else?

Rowland.