Re: design size in DVI

[Berthold Horn <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

At 05:55 1999-03-28 +0200, Laurent Siebenmann wrote:

>IN SUMMARY: "design_size" is used in a way that
>influences what appears on paper/screen only by TeX,
>which,  merely for user syntax convenience,
>sometimes uses it as a default "at_size" in
>interpreting font definitions.  If the use of the
>keyword "at" in TeX font definitions were
>*obligatory* (thus "scaled" would be forbidden) then
>"design_size" would be nothing more nor less than an
>extra checksum, something that Carl Berry and
>Berthold Horn badly want.
>
>Near miss. Too bad!

By the way, TeX itself does nothing with the checksum other 
than copy it to the DVI file. For checking whether TFM files
are set up for the correct encoding, it is handy to make
fontdimen 0 be the checksum so you can interrogate it
from inside TeX... Non-standard of course, but turned off
by the -K (Knuth) flag that kills all such extensions...

Regards, Berthold.

Berthold K.P. Horn	mailto:bkph@ai.mit.edu  http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/bkph/bkph.html

Would you say I have a plethora of piņatas?