Philip TAYLOR wrote:

Typesetting the 2008 Christmas Letter (in Computer Modern Roman 10pt scaled \magstep 1}, I was dismayed to find that both on-screen and on paper the font is depressingly light; on a bran(d) new HP CP1215 colour laserprinter, the top of the lower-case "s" definitely breaks up. I assume that this arises from the Bluesky type-1 outlines that PdfTeX presumably uses, but I wondered if there is any way for PdfTeX to artificially increase the weight (well, really the stroke width, but I know that's asking too much !).

% low level hack because PT does not use context and therefore % cannot use the high level interface: \pdfliteral{2 w 1 Tc 2 Tr}philled\pdfliteral{1 w 0 Tc 0 Tr} ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

Hans Hagen writes:

Philip TAYLOR wrote:

...

Typesetting the 2008 Christmas Letter (in Computer Modern Roman 10pt scaled \magstep 1}, I was dismayed to find that both on-screen and on paper the font is depressingly light; on a bran(d) new HP CP1215 colour laserprinter, the top of the lower-case "s" definitely breaks up. I assume that this arises from the Bluesky type-1 outlines that PdfTeX presumably uses, but I wondered if there is any way for PdfTeX to artificially increase the weight (well, really the stroke width, but I know that's asking too much !).

% low level hack because PT does not use context and therefore % cannot use the high level interface:

Well, the easiest solution is to use another font. I suppose that Phil insists on Computer Modern in order to honor Knuth's work. But if (and only if) you exactly know that the only output device is an HP CP1215 colour laserprinter, there is no reason to use so-called "scalable fonts" at all. You can instruct metafont to create optimized bitmap fonts for exactly that output device. And as far as I remember there is even a variable called "blacker"... Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just to clarify : Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) wrote:

No, Phil is lazy and is working in Plain TeX, in which the use of anything other than the CM family is more complex. But PdfTeX does not use PK fonts, does it ?

There are really a number of points here. Probably I should start by saying that having spent the last $n$ years as College Webmaster, my TeX skills are not what they once were; in addition, my previous work with Plain TeX was based around the Arbortext driver and fonts (with their special remapped TFMs, such as PSMTIMR), so I never learned how to use other type-1 fonts that do not come with remapped TFMs (or if I did once learn, I have forgotten again) [1]. Secondly, Reinhard raises a very important point : pre-type-1, one always used a mode-def appropriate to the particular printer; but now that we live in a PdfTeX world, with type-1 fonts the norm, there is no longer this facility, so Hans's recipe for darkening a font through a PDF special is really really useful and worth making more widely known. It would also be very helpful if Hans could document the operators that it uses, as I am afraid they are all Mayan to me :-( ** Phil. -------- [1] And the TeX FAQ http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=fonts-pln suggests it's anything but trivial :-(

Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) writes:

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

...

Well, the easiest solution is to use another font. I suppose that Phil insists on Computer Modern in order to honor Knuth's work.

No, Phil is lazy and is working in Plain TeX, in which the use of anything other than the CM family is more complex.

It depends. As someone who enjoys beautiful fonts I recommend to try some other ones, especially those designed by Hermann Zapf. It's certainly more complex to change the fonts in Plain TeX, but there are at least two packages you can use. The first one is ofs, the second one is plnfss. Use texdoc to browse the documentation. I don't know much about ofs but I assume it's still actively maintained. The development of plnfss is frozen, bugs reported by users will be fixed, though.

...

But if (and only if) you exactly know that the only output device is an HP CP1215 colour laserprinter, there is no reason to use so-called "scalable fonts" at all. You can instruct metafont to create optimized bitmap fonts for exactly that output device. And as far as I remember there is even a variable called "blacker"...

But PdfTeX does not use PK fonts, does it ?

Yes, if there is no entry for a particular Type1 font in updmap.cfg, then metafont will try to create one. I'm sure you noticed it already. Sometimes it happens that you accidentally load a font which doesn't exist (and therefore has no map entry): | $ pdftex '\relax\font\f=cmrrrrr10 \f hello\bye' | This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.1415926-1.40.9 (Web2C 7.5.7) | %&-line parsing enabled. | entering extended mode | | kpathsea: Running mktextfm cmrrrrr10 Anyway, if Phil is lazy, Type1 fonts are better for him because adapting a metafont mode is really quite painful. Hans' approach is fine and very convenient. There is one question though: Is a font modified this way still hinted? Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------