[tex-live] Metafont: DVI and PDF trouble

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Thomas,

some answers:

On Di, 10 Mär 2009, Thomas Hühn wrote:
> I'm doing the exercises from chapter five of the METAFONTbook.

Would be nice to include the source code you are testing.

> Then I'm converting gf to DVI: GFtoDVI io.2602gf
> 
> But GSview complains:
> 
> GSview 4.9 2007-11-18
> GPL Ghostscript 8.64 (2009-02-03)
> Copyright (C) 2009 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
> This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
> Displaying non DSC file C:/Dokumente und Einstellungen/Thomas/Eigene Dateien/Metafont/bug/exp2/io.dvi


GSview does not display DVI files, only ps (and maybe pdf).

> DVIOUT (bundled with Tex Live) displays the DVI okay.

That is expected behaviour.

> Now I'm converting to PDF: dvipdfm io.dvi
> 
> Acrobat Reader displays it okay, although the shading is quite uneven,
> you see some lines in it. Probably bad resolution?

It is pixel font, and acroread is good with vector fonts.

> Again converting to DVI. Same error in GSview, again display okay in
> DVIOUT.

Of course.

> After converting to PDF, the result is horrible:
> http://www.thomas-huehn.de/mf/windows/exp3/io.pdf

No idea, but you could try with dvipdfmx, or send the output of the
dvipdfm command line.

> Gnome's document viewer (evince) does not open the DVI file, but
> complains about invalid format.

evince can display ps and pdf, but not dvi (AFAIR)

> Any ideas?

All a problem of the black font probably. It is made by default in 600
dpi resolution, and if you are blowing it up to big big it probably is
too small. I didn't investigate the details.

> Another thing: is there a way to get readline-like behaviour on
> Metafont's prompt, just as in Windows?

What do you mean "as in Windows"? On Windows metafont does not have
readline support, does it?

Anyway, one has to program readline support into metafont ... I am not
sure there is anyone willing to do that.

> And how do I get better resolution printouts, I suppose I need a
> higher-resolution grey font?

Probably yes.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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