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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!godot!bruce
From: bruce@godot.UUCP (Bruce Nemnich)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: DVI question
Message-ID: <602@godot.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 11-Dec-84 13:50:49 EST
Article-I.D.: godot.602
Posted: Tue Dec 11 13:50:49 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 12-Dec-84 05:31:10 EST
References: <256@zinfandel.UUCP> <1671@umcp-cs.UUCP> <4755@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: bruce@godot.UUCP (Bruce Nemnich)
Organization: Thinking Machines, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 31
Summary: 

In article <4755@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>I hate to tell you this, but even TeX has to care about the output
>device.  Things like character widths affect line breaks, and widths
>are seldom the same from one device to another.  The use of device-
>independent units of measurement is a red herring; the quality of the
>output is still going to be poor if the formatter has the wrong idea
>about what device the stuff is headed for.

TeX output is completely device-independent; it knows nothing about the
output device.  What it does know about are fonts, which are identical
to TeX across devices.  If the relative widths, heights, or shapes of
glyphs in a font are different on two devices, the two fonts are
certainly not the same.

Regardless of what one thinks of the Computer Modern family of fonts,
one must applaud Knuth's METAFONT (which is in the process of being
completely rewritten as TeX was a couple of years ago) for providing a
way to design and scale raster fonts for a variety of resolutions,
making them available on many, many printers.  Hopefully many more
designers will use the new version, which will be as portable as TeX
itself.

I can make a DVI file and view it on a LispMachine screen, print it on
our QMS 1200 or Versatec, take it to MIT and print it on their Dover or
Xerox 9700, give it to any one of a number of typesetting firms, etc.
They will all appear the same, within the pixel-rounding margin of error
for each device.

-- 
--Bruce Nemnich, Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
  ihnp4!godot!bruce, bjn@mit-mc.arpa ... soon to be bruce@godot.arpa