[pdftex] Computer Modern Fonts

[Robin Fairbairns]

> Maybe someone has asked this beforewards, but I
> couldn't find the answer. I was taking a look at the
> web just to see the prices of ec type1 fonts and I
> found in
>  
> .../nonfree/systems/win32/bakoma/dst/fonts.html#cmfonts
> 
> The font pack includes 652 fonts: 325 in T1 TeX
> Encoding (EC fonts ) and 237 in TS1 TeX Encoding (TC
> fonts ). The fonts are optimized for
> embedding into PDF. The main feature is that flexes
> are replaced with stright lines. This feature reduces
> font size and look good enought both on
> display and on medium resulution printers. 

i've no idea of the quality of these fonts, since afaict, they're
available only in a format for use with bakoma tex.  (i've no doubt i
could find someone to crack the format, but i don't have the time
myself, or the inclination.)

> When I read this it came to my mind if the quality of
> the cm type1 fonts (public ones) is the same as the
> quality of the mf equivalents. I know that this fonts
> are made with metapost but with man's intervention,
> does it mean that the shapes are not exactly the
> same?, Why can not we use directly the output of
> metapost?.

the bsr/y&y/ams fonts (the ones you're presumably talking about)
aren't afaik the result of metapost conversion.  indeed, metapost
won't even process a good proportion of metafont files, unassisted.
even if it did, its output is not a type 1 font, but rather a set of
more-or-less standard postscript pictures.

whatever, the ams type1 fonts are extremely good, for what they are.

> Once I heard that the ec fonts are better than the cm
> ones , not just because of the hypenation and that the
> accents are included, something about ¿kerning?, Is
> that right.

knuth froze the kerning information in the cm fonts pretty early, and
there are some kerns that are blaringly necessary that are thereby
excluded.  a lot more kerning pairs are present in the current ec font
set than there are in cm (even allowing for the greater number of
characters in ec); this probably makes text prepared with them look
better.  whether this improvement would have survived malyshev's
conversions to type 1 i really don't know.