TeXhax Digest Monday, March 14, 1988 Volume 88 : Issue 25 [SCORE.STANFORD.EDU]TEXHAX25.88 Editor: Malcolm Brown Today's Topics: Lowercase Greek letters in bold 'miscellaneous' font directory TeX on MacII Need a Bib style file hyphenation patterns for Hungarian, anyone? Font question TeX in C on Symmetry TeX in C on Symmetry bibtex .99 in C Symmetry undump latex question re: re: PC TeX V2.1 /i + /z option Re: Font question C Preprocessor for VMS A question about figures in LaTeX Postscript - IBM - Laserprinter Mailing list: GraphUK APL font for TeX PC-TeX vs MicroTeX Font issues. dvi previewers ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: CFTE%MCGILLA.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu Date: TUE MAR 08, 1988 10.10.06 Subject: Lowercase Greek letters in bold From: Shawn Farrell McGill University (514) 398-3676 Hello there, I was wondering if anybody knows of an available font or of a way to get lowercase Greek letters to print in bold face. Thanks, Shawn CFTE@MCGILLA.BITNET ------------------------------ Date: Tue Mar 8 17:56:20 MET 1988 From: XITIJSCH%DDATHD21.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu Subject: 'miscellaneous' font directory In TeXhax #17 Joe Weening writes Barbara Beeton pointed out to me that fonts with a non-standard magnifi- cation (i.e., 4.0 which is not a power of 1.2), can cause a problem for systems that use a separate directory for each magnification. My advice is either to create a special directory for this font, or to have a "miscellaneous" directory that is searched for fonts not otherwise found. That's what we do at SAIL and it has proved to be quite useful when people need non-standard magnifications. This only works if the magnification is encoded in the file name as well as the directory name, which not everyone does. I wish they would since the redundancy is good to have in this case. I disagree with his last sentence. The solution to encode the magnification (or the resolution) directly in the font names can lead to difficulties if you want to write (and maintain) a portable driver family which runs on several different operating systems. Especially the PC's allow only up to three letters in their extension and it is impossible to denote all possible magnifications in these three letters. Therefore I don't think that the `miscellaneous' directory is `quite useful' and I want to propose an other possibility. Let's denote all font directories for a special output device as a device area. There exist standard fonts for this output device in a standard device area which is maintained be the (TeX) system administrator. If a font has an unusual magnification such as 4.0 (and this font is important for all users) the administrator can easily and has to create a new directory for this font. Otherwise -- if this font is only of interest for a single person -- this person should create his own device area. The driver should search for a font in the personal device area first and afterwards in the standard device area. In this way people who need non-standard magnifi- cations can set them up by their own -- they even can substitute standard fonts with their own fonts. Furthermore the usage of directories for different magnifications allows it to easily substitute non-existant fonts with a font of the same set, i.e., a font with an other magnification. The encoding of the magnification in the font names forces handling of wild cards in font names which is not easily done in many operating systems (e.g. UNIX). In our drivers we allow three device areas: (1) the current directory, this is useful for playing with METAFONT, (2) a directory which can be specified by an environment variable (or a logical or something similar -- this depends on the host system) and (3) a `hardcoded' directory name which can be changed during the installation process. I hope this mail was of interest for all those out there which must write DVI drivers. Joachim TH Darmstadt Institut fuer Theoretische Informatik Joachim Schrod Alexanderstr. 24 Bitnet: XITIJSCH@DDATHD21 (Please try again if I don't answer --- D-6100 Darmstadt our Bitnet connection is very instable...) West Germany ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 8 Mar 88 11:36:13 CST From: Deane Yang Subject: TeX on MacII I need an answer to the following question: Can a Mac II drive an HP Laserjet II to print out DVI output generated by TeXtures or MacTeX? I have seen an ad for something called PrintWorks that claims to be a driver for the HPLaser Jet II, but I can't find any more information about it. Also, if the answer is yet, is this a reasonable alternative to buying a Postscript printer? Since I do not know how to access the bulletin board, please reply to my arpanet address: yang@rice.edu (or yang@math1.rice.edu). Thanks. Deane Yang, Department of Mathematics, Rice University ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 8 Mar 88 20:11:47 EST From: kumard@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Deepak Kumar) Subject: Need a Bib style file We only have the following style files File Name Style plain.bst [1] Author ...etc alpha.bst [Abc87] Abcadab etc... abbrv.bst ... ... But what I need is a style spec that produces [Nerd 1987] J K Nerd ...etc for our LaTeX system. Anybody know if it exists? Deepak. ------------------------------ Subject: hyphenation patterns for Hungarian, anyone? Date: Wed, 09 Mar 88 10:33:58 -0500 From: Stephen Gildea I have a friend who wants to typeset Hungarian. Does anyone know of a set of hyphenation patterns for Hungarian? < Stephen ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Mar 88 13:24:18 cst From: cmkuo@cs.utexas.edu (Chin-Ming Kuo) Subject: Font question I recently acquired a tool to convert PK fonts into Mac font format. However under our /usr/lib/tex/fonts, all files are of pxl or tfm formats. Can anyone explain what exactly all those font formats means and where can I get sources of 'pxtopk' or 'gftopk'? Many thanks, -- Chin-Ming Kuo cmkuo@im4u.utexas.edu ut-sally!cmkuo ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 10:33:04 JST From: Takagi Shigeyuki Subject: TeX in C on Symmetry Dear Dr. MacKay and TeXhax readers: I have completed installing TeX in C on our Sequent Symmetry. For those who do not know TeX in C: TeX-to-C conversion program is included in the standard UNIX TeX 2.9 distribution tape from U. of Washington. I got it at the beginning of March/1988. Since Sequent has not supported pc/pxp yet, I had to build tex.p on my SUN. All other TeX in C installation procedures went fine. One of my user tried to run about 160 pages of Japanese LaTeX article. It was necessary to run 3 times to complete the reference as usual. On Balance Pascal version, the 3rd trial went out of memory, but on Symmetry C version the process completed normally. The 1st run is measured with ptime command and the result is: utime stime elapsed machine/compiler/TeX version 336.1 5.6 348.0 Symmetry/C/2.9 1779.9 367.1 2174.6 Balance/Pascal/2.1 In general, users' C programs run about 3 times faster on Symmetry. So, TeX in C is about twice faster than TeX in Pascal for this case. We needed a few modifications for Balance-undump to run for Symmetry. I will pack all Symmetry-undump staff into a shar file and will send the shar file to both U.Washington and TeXhax moderator soon. Best regards, S.Takagi, Japanese TeXhax re-distribution takagi%icot.jp@relay.cs.net %%% Pierre MacKay replies: ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Mar 88 20:30:01 PST From: mackay@june.cs.washington.edu (Pierre MacKay) Subject: TeX in C on Symmetry Many thanks. We just got the FromJapan TeX tape. It will take us a while to appreciate all the wealth of programming and fonts there. I will pass your evaluation on to Tim Morgan. In a short while, we will be able to offer all of TeX, METAFONT and TeXware WEB for C compilation. With best wishes, Pierre MacKay ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Mar 88 21:31:26 EST From: kgk%cs.brown.edu@RELAY.CS.NET Subject: bibtex .99 in C Has the latest version of Bibtex been translated into C yet? Or more to the point, where could I possibly get a copy? ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 13:33:10 JST From: Takagi Shigeyuki Subject: Symmetry undump Dear Dr. MacKay and TeXhax readers: Dr. Chikayama modified the Balance version of undump for Symmetry. This is now running on our Symmetry and used for installing TeX. I expect that the moderator of texhax will split the actual shar file and ship only this message to texhax. The actual shar file will be included in the UNIX TeX distribution from U. of Washington and also kept in the public directory at SCORE. The same thing was done for Balance undump before. S.Takagi, Japanese TeXhax re-distribution takagi%icot.jp@relay.cs.net %%% S. Takagi's submission is too long for digest distribution. It %%% is stored on SCORE.STANFORD.EDU under %%% takagi.txh %%% A copy has been forwarded to TEX-L for BITNET distribution %%% Malcolm ------------------------------ Date: 03/10/88 10:22:16 GMT+1 From: X114%DDAGSI3.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu Subject: latex question We want to produce a figure caption in LaTeX using the \caption command where the Figure n: is indented to the left some em's like this: Body of figure Figure 1: bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla b bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla b Has anybody already encountered this problem and solved it ? Michael Dahlinger, University of Mainz, Germany X114@DDAGSI3.BITNET ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 12:04:58 MET From: cmb%DERRZE0.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU Subject: re: re: PC TeX V2.1 /i + /z option Bill Kaster wrote in texhax v88i21---that they at PC TEX could not reproduce the strange /i+/z behaviour with the SliTeX version at SCORE.STANFORD.EDU... May be they didn't use the latest LATEX.TEX and SLIDES.STY, LPLAIN.TEX, SPLAIN.TEX exc. at the same time (the LATEX.TEX distributed with PC TEX V2.1 ---a version of mid 1987---is some kilo bytes smaller than the latest SCORE.STANFORD.EDU version; with PC TEX V1.5 one even had to eliminate the comments out of (latest) LATEX.TEX to get it processed by INITEX without a buffer overflow). Here on campus we could reproduce the "failure" on different machines (Olivettis, IBM ATs...) but ALWAYS with the COMPLETE latest LATEX file collection. We did not "succeed" to reproduce it with the one that is delivered with PC TEX V2.1 itself. Hope this will help people who want to use the new style collection with their version of PC TEX.... I will try to work out the problem with Bill Kaster and report any solutions, misunderstandings etc. to texhax as soon as they are known... - Clemens Beckstein c/o Dept. of Comp. Science #6 University of Erlangen Martenstr. 3 D-8520 Erlangen, W. Germany e-mail: cmb@derrze0.bitnet (derrze zero .bitnet) ------------------------------ Date: Thu 10 Mar 88 05:13:45-PST From: Barbara Beeton Subject: Re: Font question all the tex font formats havee been well documented; a list of where the descriptinos can be found was published in tugboat 7#1, p 17. the web sources of all the *to* programs can be found in one of the subdirectories at score.stanford.edu, from which they are available for anonymous ftp. -- barbara beeton ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 07:57:28 mst From: Jonathan Corbet Subject: C Preprocessor for VMS The GNU project has a C preprocessor that you can grab. We have modified it a little to run under VMS, and it seems to work quite well. If there is interest in the code, I can put it up for anonymous FTP here; I'm a little reluctant to send it through the mail, since it is, in the tradition of GNU code, rather large. Jonathan Corbet National Center for Atmospheric Research, Field Observing Facility Internet: corbet@rdss.ucar.edu Usenet: ...!hao!rdss!corbet Span: rdss::corbet (or 9452::corbet) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 10:48 EST From: Haim Levkowitz Subject: A question about figures in LaTeX Hi, Is there a way to make a figure that's longer than one page? I have some text that I want to put in a figure, but since it's longer than a page, LaTeX just discards whatever doesn't fit on the page. I would like it to continue on the next page. Possible? Ever done before? Thanks a lot, --Haim Levkowitz Levkowitz@cis.upenn.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 16:33:49 MET From: RCDILAA%HDETUD1.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU Subject: Postscript - IBM - Laserprinter We are looking for TEX versions for IBM mainframe. We are running VM/CMS (but also MVS). Who has installed TEX? We are planning a printing service. "We" is the combination of (a) the Computing Centre and (b) the Central Printing Office of the Delft University of Technology. Up to now both operate independently. Both produce printed matter, with differing characteristics: (a) Low quality, low volume, short delivery times; (b) High quality, medium to high volume, long (oops) delivery times. Users are producing printed matter more and more on themselves, desktop publishing (or something they give that name) is spreading rapidly. We think they still want to pay for high quality, high volume, output which is finished the way they want (double sided, binded, packed, etcetera). The university is running a broadband Ethernet based campus wide network: DUneT. Suppose we would decide (A) to hang a big "printer" at the network directly, that printer should be spoken to in Postscript, I suppose. Users would send files directly to that address. Or: suppose we would decide (B) to connect the "printer" to our mainframe (IBM 3083, running VM/CMS). Users would direct their output to a virtual machine. "Printer" stands for a printing service. Laserprinter(?) (300 dots per inch? 600?), and IBM 4250(?) or photosetter(?) We already use a Xerox 2700 for low volume, medium quality output, still going strong. We intend to keep using it. Now: (A) In a way this possibility (up and running anywhere?) looks very versatile. But it seems very difficult to handle priorities and workload, and accounting. (B) In another way a very comforting possibility: we would keep our hands on it, accounting is easy. A few questions now: (A) We did hear a rumor of existing hardware to join printer and Ethernet. Which brand? Does it accept Postscript? (B) Is Postscript to printer software available? Is TEX for IBM mainframe available? (C) Some of you already running this sort of shop? (D) Laserprinter: Xerox (300 DPI)? Siemens (600 DPI)? IBM coming at the Hannover Messe with something new? (Latest rumor: they didn't succeed in buying Siemens' laserprinter?). (E) Why not put PC with laserprinter combinations at the faculty buildings, so users can locally preview their output? Question still lingering: "do they really want high quality?". I am convinced the answer is "yes". Well, I suppose this story is not very detailed, but I can - and should like to - answer questions. Any ideas? Thank you for any reactions. Hans van der Laan Bitnet: rcdilaa@hdetud1 Delft University of Technology Computing Centre Postbus 354 2600 AJ Delft ------------------------------ Date: 10-MAR-1988 17:17:43 GMT -01:00 From: THOWARD%graphics.computer-science.manchester.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK Subject: Mailing list: GraphUK With the proliferation of mailing lists, we can see no reason for computer graphics and associated topics to be exempt. There is (sporadically) INFO-GRAPHICS, but it's very heavily biased towards USA topics. We believe there is a need for a UK (and European) list to cover the kind of topics suggested below. These are not to be considered as definitive, rather a starting point. Please note that graphuk will be a *moderated* list in digest format. Computer Graphics Graphics Packages (Gino, NAG Graphics, UNIRAS ....) Image processing Windows User Interfaces Computational Geometry Curves and surfaces Projective Geometry Visual Realism Shading and lighting models Graphics Standards (GKS, GKS-3D, PHIGS, CGM, CGI ... CGM-3D ...) de-facto Standards PostScript PEX PHIGS+ Eurographics matters etc... We would welcome contributions in the following areas: (1) News items, announcements of meetings, courses etc. (2) Requests for help/advice. (3) Offers of help/information. (4) Questions for debate. like "Graphics Standards are a waste of time, because de-facto standards are better". (6) Gossip - no libel!!!!! Requests for membership to: graphUK-request@uk.ac.man.cs.cgu Submissions to: graphUK@uk.ac.man.cs.cgu (Internet: graphUK-request%cgu.cs.man.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk) Terry Hewitt and Toby Howard Computer Graphics Unit Department of Computer Science University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL United Kingdom +44 61-275-6094 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 14:05:59 AST From: "Steven Osborne - Computer Science UNB" Subject: APL font for TeX In the V8#3 issue of Tugboat there was an article on an APL font. I think I remember some one mentioning in TeXhax the possibility of getting it from Norway(?) and putting it in the distribution. Has this been done yet? Has anyone got the Metafont Source for this font yet (or any APL font for that matter)? If so I would greatly appreciate it if someone could e-mail me the source. Thanks. Sincerely Yours Steven Osborne Hardware Systems Specialist School of Computer Science University of New Brunswick P.O. Box 4400 Fredericton, NB Canada E3B 5A3 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 14:15:49 AST From: "Steven Osborne - Computer Science UNB" Subject: PC-TeX vs MicroTeX I am considering making a pitch to our local Computing Centre for getting a site licence for a PC version of TeX. I currently know of PC-TeX and MicroTeX. Does anyone have any advice or comments on which one is better, etc. ? If there are some newer and better products, I am willing to hear about them. I also notice that PC-TeX and MicroTeX employees seem to subscribe to TeXhax as well so if they are listening then I am willing to hear their sales pitches as well. I would also like to know the current going rates for site licences for these products. Note that I reside in Canada and would appreciate it if prices were given in Canadian dollars, but barring that I will accept US prices as long as they include any additional costs incurred for Canadian customers. Thanks in advance. Sincerely Yours Steven Osborne Hardware Systems Specialist School of Computer Science University of New Brunswick P.O. Box 4400 Fredericton, NB Canada E3B 5A3 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 13:46:01 EST From: "Karl Berry." Subject: Font issues. Re cmssdc40: the person who brought this up suggested simply multiplying all the parameters in cmssdc10 by 4. My comment was that this would probably notproduce decent letters, and probably wouldn't make it through Metafont, since some parameters should decrease with design size, I seem to remember. Obviously, generating cmssdc10 at another magnification works, as the person who replied to me did the experiment. Re cmr5: I think this came up before, and the answer was that it was intention, probably because ligatures at such small sizes don't fit well with the spacing of the other characters. (cmr5, like other well-designed typefaces, has proportionately darker and spaced wider than its larger size counterparts.) Re cmsl11 and other missing sizes: I believe Knuth only cared about certain sizes because those were the only sizes he needs to print the Art of Computer Programming, which was the genesis of his type research. Perhaps when he started the Computer Modern design, he didn't deem it worthwhile to adjust all the other parameters automatically to the design size. Judging from his remarks in volume E of Computers & Typesetting, however, I doubt that he will make an ``official'' cmsl11, or whatever else. To be called Computer Modern, the TFM files have to match exactly, and perhaps the GF files also, for the sizes Knuth designed. Therefore, Sauter's fonts are probably legally called Computer Modern. (I think Knuth knows about Sauter's efforts, anyway.) A while back someone brought up doing screen-resolution characters with Metafont. Richard Southall's partly-completed design was supposed to adapt itself well to low resolutions. I wrote to him asking what his experience was. Here is the relevant parts of his reply. I think it may be of general interest to hear what a professional type designer has to say about Metafont. From Richard Southall: You can do *anything* with Metafont if you know how, just as you can with TeX (if you know how). With Metafont as with TeX, though, it's the knowing how (or the finding out) that's the difficult bit. Don Knuth was developing the new Metafont (MF) at the same time that I was working with it at Stanford in 1984-85; one of the reasons for my being there was to provide some type-designerly input to the design of the language itself. Because the language was being developed simultaneously with my use of it, I worked out a set of macros of my own that were built out of MF's primitive functions and operators, and made no use of the more elaborate simulated "pens" that Knuth implemented later on. (In fact part of the reason the design took so long to do was that in the early stages I had to keep on rewriting bits of it to make use of features that Knuth was adding to the basic language.) A feature of the environment at Stanford was that it was fairly difficult to install fonts on devices other than 300-dpi laser printers, and hence difficult to develop a design in a range of resolutions. At Strasbourg,where I worked for eight months in late 1985 and 1986, we had three output devices of different resolutions (300-dpi laser printer, 185-dpi needle printer, and 1024 x 768 CRT display), and it was easy to install fonts on all of them. This provided an ideal environment for looking at the problems of character image quality at low resolution, which I was (and am) very interested in, and I spent most of the time at Strasbourg making my macros work reliably on all three devices.I didn't update my design to take advantage of Knuth's developments of his MF macros: partly because there was more than enough to do in making the design work properly in its existing form, partly because we didn't get MFversion 1.0 until the last month of my time at Strasbourg, but mostly because I found the idea of "pens" very much at odds with my conception of how character shapes work. Many features of character shapes, that are very desirable on technical grounds,were more difficult to implement with "pens" than with simple manipulations of the points on the outline. (An example is a stroke that has one edge straight and one curved, like the strokes in a bold sanserif V.) It may well be that Knuth's "pens" now do everything that I want them to;I have MF 1.0 on a microcomputer, but I haven't looked at it properly or read the published version of The MFbook thoroughly. I think it's true to say, though, that Knuth has never been very interested in the problems of low resolution,and that Computer Modern isn't optimized for low-resolution devices. Another thing that may bother the TeXHaX is that at medium (let alone low) resolutions it becomes difficult to reconcile "device-independent" character metrics with character image quality. At these resolutions you can't get away from the fact that the character images are built out of pixels, and their shapes and dimensions depend on the size and arrangement of the pixels they are made of.For good technical quality, the character widths need to be dictated by the characters' actual dimensions, rather than being imposed from outside. This is a big problem: I can see ways in which it might be solvable, but they aren't easy to implement. I wrote up some thoughts along these lines in a paper for the 1986 "TeX in scientific documentation" conference at Strasbourg. The proceedings were edited by Jacques Desarmenien, and published by Springer in the "Lecture notes in computer science" series (no. 236). Richard S ------------------------------ Subject: dvi previewers Date: Thu, 10 Mar 88 14:28:02 -0500 From: Ken Yap DVI previewer authors, I'm preparing a talk on DVI previewers for the TUG meeting. I would be grateful for any documentation you can send me on non-proprietary previewers on *non-Unix* systems. Not code, just documentation, like the man page or a Users Guide. Or even better still, an installation guide or an implementors roadmap. I just want to get an survey of how other previewers work. All contributed information will be acknowledged. Thanks in advance. Ken ken@cs.rochester.edu ..!rochester!ken ------------------------------ %%% %%% subscriptions, address changes to: texhax-request@score.stanford.edu %%% please send a valid arpanet address!! %%% %%% BITNET distribution: subscribe by sending the following %%% line to LISTSERV@TAMVM1.BITNET: %%% SUBSCRIBE TEX-L %%% %%% submissions to: texhax@score.stanford.edu %%% %%%\bye %%% ------------------------------ End of TeXhax Digest ************************** -------