[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: A story about depths and heights



> The conclusion of all this seems to be that the restrictions of the tfm
> format might be appropriate for text fonts, but they can pose major
> problem for math extension fonts, where the aim is to provide many
> different sizes.

15 heights and 15 depths max, yes that sounds familiar. But I believe it
is a restriction only of the Metafont *program*, not of the tfm file
format. If you can produce a .tfm file with 256 different depths and
heights I don't think TeX has any trouble using it.

If there are no improved versions of Metafont available which lift the
15/15 restriction, then I guess for a math extension font I would
probably try to postprocess the output of Metafont to put the heights
and depths back to their natural values. Come to think of it, maybe the
easiest thing to do would be to split the symbols into a number of
smaller fonts and have the postprocessor just be some adequately clever
concatenation script. That should give you the .tfm file easily enough
anyway; for PK files the biggest problem might be making it all work in
a context where PKs are created on demand.

Michael Downes, mjd@ams.org