Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!ico!vail!rcd
From: rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: troff italic greek
Summary: some repair possible (but tedious)
Message-ID: <16009@vail.ICO.ISC.COM>
Date: 11 Aug 89 22:33:30 GMT
References: <36700007@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp, Boulder, CO
Lines: 44

In article <36700007@m.cs.uiuc.edu>, gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
> I'm using "ptroff" on NeXT to generate postscript output from troff.
> Unfortunately, there is a problem with the symbol font.  All the greek
> (upper & lower case) characters and numerals comes out in a normal
> face...

It is an upright face, yes.

> (1) Does adobe plan to fix this bug in their driver?

It is not a "bug in their driver".  It doesn't have anything to do with a
driver; it's the way the symbol font was designed.  I don't like it either,
simply because (as you noted) the conventional style of Greek for use with
mathematics is slanted.  (I hesitate to say "italic"--somehow "italic
Greek" doesn't sound quite right.:-)

> (2) Probably the simplest fix is to change the psdit.pro files to CONS
> up a new font with italic greek and numerals, and then replace symbol
> temporarily on the server...
> ...Is this even possible?

It is possible to cobble something together, but it's not easy.  You can
modify the font transformation to use the existing outlines but slant them
a bit.  However, note that you want to do this *only* for the Greek
alphabet--you don't want slanted mathematical symbols.  This means you need
to split out references to the symbol font according to whether they're
Greek or not, or else have two symbol fonts.  I played around with this a
while back and, for a test case, I used a font transformation matrix of
[24 0 6.6 24 -2 0] (obviously to test it in 24-pt; you'll need to rescale).
The 6.6/24 was a roundish number that fairly closely matches the italic
angle of Times Italic.  The -2 was a bit of italic adjustment I was using
in the test.  Since eqn does italic adjustment on its own, better play
with mixtures of text to see what adjustment, if any, is needed.

This will be a lot easier to figure out (and more useful for the future)
if you're using a recent troff--the DWB version usually called ditroff.

This doesn't really give the font you want--slanting a font is not the same
as making an italic version--but it's less jarring.  I wish that Adobe
would produce another math-symbol font with a Greek alphabet specifically
designed slanted.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd@ico.isc.com    uucp: {ncar,nbires}!ico!rcd     (303)449-2870
   ...Are you making this up as you go along?