Re: Poor man's oldstyle figures

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

At 12:31 PM 99/05/10 +0200, Thierry Bouche wrote:

>» why doesn't fontinst scale poor man's small caps automatically
>» (by dividing xheight/capheight or \height{x} by \height{A} or
>» something)
>
>If you want to keep the stem weight you need to scale only vertically
>(or scale 90 % horizontally, 65 % vertically, e.g.). 

Right, the closest you can come to approximating smallcaps is to scale
differently (less) horizontally than vertically and to not go down to
x-height, but some fraction of cap-height (the "best" value of
which depends on the particular font).  It will, of course, not look nearly
right unless you also adjust the stem widths and the side-bearings.

>But then you
>enter the dark area of font freaking, and you'll realize soon that one
>trick that works in one case won't on another design. For instance,

         cmdunh10 :-)

>the letter o in Futura cannot be anything else than a perfect circle,
>so faking an oblique version or a non homothetical small cap will
>yield something unusable (as are some Bitstream's Futura weights,
>btw...). So the choice (as any default choice) is between a bad
>solution that is never very bad nor very well suited, and a specific
>solution that works in one case, and could be tailored for few other
>cases... 
>
>Better not using faked glyphs anyway.

         Amen!

Regards, Berthold Horn
Berthold K.P. Horn		mailto:bkph@ai.mit.edu