Re: [NTG-pdftex] Ugly rules in PDF

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"Hartmut" == Hartmut Henkel writes:

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At Bachotek2005 there was a talk about the Latin Modern fonts, and there was a small math example included, of course. The presentation was shown using Adobe's PDF reader, and as you probably know, it displays the rules TeX draws for fractions and the radical bar horribly.

not to forget braces, so maybe also vertical lines are needed?

There are vertical rules in Computer Modern already. But you are right, \underbrace looks very ugly in PDF and maybe people need normal braces with arbitrary height.

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(A suitable character has to be available, of course. It should be a dash, positioned flat on top of the baseline, no sidebearings)

Maybe instead of these repetitions you also could use the Tz operator together with font size scaling for stretching a single e.g. 1bp*1bp square pad to the wanted width/height? And what if this char. even came from an artificial one-character-only Type-1 font, produced (with proper hinting :-) inside pdftex?

That was my first thought when I saw that at BachoTeX. It was really horrible, the beamer had a pretty low resolution, BTW. But what happens if \pdfoutput=0 ? PostScript \specials are not portable. So there are three possibilities: 1. An internal font is used for PDF output and a rule for dvi. 2. An external font is used always which can be used by a dvi->ps converter as well. A rule is inserted if the font is not found. 3. An internal font is used for PDF output and a rule is inserted for dvi output unless an external font is found. The latter is probably the best. Scaling one character is IMHO the best solution. Hans already mentioned PicTeX. It might be obsolete, but for testing what Taco proposed, it's great. Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-4592165 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------