CM fonts

[Lars Hellström]

At 19.16 +0200 2002-04-27, Nirmal Govind wrote:
>Hi,
>
>This may be a bit off-topic but it looked like the list that came closest
>to the issue.

The tex-fonts list (tex-fonts@math.utah.edu) would be more appropriate.

>I have a question about the Computer Modern fonts. When I print documents
>written in CM fonts with a 600dpi printer, the output on paper appears a
>bit too light (though on the computer screen it looks great). I've heard
>that for the output to look better on paper, the resolution needs to be at
>least 1200dpi. I just read that in 1992 Donald Knuth had made some changes
>so that the letterforms look good at low resolutions.

Hmm, that is probably an overstatement. It's mainly a matter of chosing the
order in which quantities are rounded a bit more carefully (in particular:
keeping the _ratio_ of some quantities to the character width fixed while
the latter is rounded).

>I'm using Miktex on a
>cygwin platform so I'm guessing that this is already part of Miktex. So my
>question - is there any way to make the CM fonts look better (i.e. slightly
>thicker/darker) on paper? I think these fonts look awesome and so I'd like
>to stick to them as much as possible.

That can certainly be done (by changing the printer mode that MF works
with), but it may well be the case that what you see is the CM fonts as
they are _supposed_ to look. People often think that these fonts are too
light, when in fact they just look the way they were designed to.

Lars Hellström