MathTimePro (was: Status of Lucida and Y&Y TeX)

[Walter Schmidt]

Paulo Ney de Souza schrieb:

> I expliciltly mentioned in my letter that some of these - including the
> the $h^ef$ case are inherited from MathTime!

$h^ef$ is one of those cases that TeX just cannot get right automatically.
Indeed, using CM rather than MathTime or MT-Pro it looks less ugly, but
that's for one reason only:  The CM Math Italic font is less slanted than
the italic variant of Times or TimesNR, so you have fewer problems with
the space before the f.

> [...]
>     >An accumulation of delimiters like this will _alway_ look ugly.
>     >Under normal circumstances, the outer delimiters should be enlarged,
>     >anyway:  $ ... [\alpha]\big) ... $.
>
> Yes, you can also do kerning by hand, and insert \! all over your file,
> but what we are discussing here is not ways to make it look good, is the
> font itself (raw).

I'm not speaking about manual corrections to the spacing.  I'm speaking
about the fact that immediately consecutive parens and brackets of the
same size are ugly and hard to read and should be avoided.  Thus, the
spacing was never tested against this particular case.   We're going to
rethink it.

>     >The MathTime fonts include the round parentheses from the "Times"
>     >text font, so you don't see any difference, when your text font is,
>     >indeed, "Times".  MathTime Pro, in contrast, comes with parens that
>     >were initially designed to blend best with "TimesNR".
>
> That is a design decision that has very little reason-d-etre ...
> Michael can try making a font that will blend with everything ...
> it will probably not look good.

I could esaily claim that your choice of the cheap "Times", rather
than "Times NR" or "Times Ten" is the source of the problem...

> Michael already know about it, I have personaly told him and have also
> filled a complaint with the distributor, there is no use in beating the
> dead hose even further ...

I agree that this list isn't the right place for this discussion.


Walter Schmidt