[pdftex] fonts

[Christoph Bier]

Adam Kucharczyk schrieb am 11.10.2005 16:29:

> Hello.
> 
> First of all, as for my first post here: thank you all for such a
> fantastic program! I do like pdftex very much for it's beautiful
> typesetting, way beyond any competitor!

ACK (ok, it's my second posting :-))

> ivo_welch-pdftex at mailblocks.com napisał(a):
> 
>>...and we of course all hope that with all these different fonts will
>>come a utility program that will be smart enough to ask the user where
>>his font [and perhaps other necessary files] sit, understand [perhaps
>>even guess] encodings, then copy/load them all correctly into the TeX
>>distribution (pdftex, latex, dvips, etc), and tell the user "now you can
>>use your font xyzxyzxyz, use \\font{xyz}\n".
> 
> look at those screenshots:
> http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex
> 
> I think that breaking the old way to install and use fonts would be a
> revolution at least as big as microtype functions. I don't think that
> there would be any complainers: look how easy people accepted to abandon
> .dvi for the beauty of microtypography.

They don't. Currently there's a discussion on de.comp.text.tex where
you can find users that still prefer dvi -> ps -> pdf. Reasons are
(I can not defend them---I just asked a guy that prefers dvi):

- usage of PostScript code (he doesn't want to use ps4pdf or pst-pdf)

- hardware limitations: faster dvi output (also with pdfTeX)

- "cleaner" color management via PS

- size of the PDF files because of the usage of CFF with Ghostscript
or Distiller (with impressive examples)

- optional subsampling of bitmap files to the same resolution

- lots of warnings by AcroPro-Preflights on PDFs produced by
pdflatex (the OP doesn't know whether this problem disappeared in
the meantime; last time he tested was in August 2004)

And even using DVI you can use the microtypographic features with
the DVI output of pdfTeX. Ok, font expansion then needs lots of disk
space.

> Reading the thread "pdftex
> versus dvips" should give enough courage to make pdftex the typesetting
> wonder of the future, even at the cost of loosing backward compatibility.

I use pdfTeX for some years now and never observed those problems
except of bigger PDFs. Can any of those arguments above be weakened?

Regards,
    Christoph
-- 
+++ Typografie-Regeln: http://www.zvisionwelt.de/typokurz.pdf (1.4)