On 12/23/2020 11:36 AM, mf wrote:
When I started using ConTeXt, font management gave me headaches because I expected fonts to be indefinitely scalable and not to be designed in advance at fixed sizes.
That came from using software like Word, where fonts are scalable at any size. Since I had no background in typesetting, I took vector, indefinitely scalable fonts for granted. With that mindset a 48pt font is just a 10pt font scaled 4.8 times.
Then I knew about optical sizes, which were the norm with lead glyphs, because they came in heavy physical sets. And so the notion that as the font body gets bigger, the stroke gets thinner (so it's not just scaling).
I like this feature because it should make playing with sizes easier for people while lighter for machines, even though fixed sizes to be designed in advance enforce discipline and consistency in documents. Of course we can still keep the abstraction because we can define sizes, think of:
\definescaledfont[bfe][xscale=2000,yscale=6000,style=bf] (just made this feature work in two directions, not yet uploaded). But you're right, we have to educate users in this. Actually, I was wondering iif this could be abused to do vertical hz ... filling a vbox / page with subtle scaling. It should be relatively easy to implement, so when I'm bored ... Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------