Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site godot.UUCP 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