🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Oct23.132755.18431@bradley2.bradley.edu> brad@ds3.bradley.edu (Bradley E. Smith) writes:
>>You might want to try rerunning the postscript program that comes with
>>tpscript to see if it gets the widths any different.  Or, twiddle manually.
>>Or, modify tpscript to not optimize runs of periods (don't do the latter
>>unless you really have to).

>I used the font tables that came with tpscript.  So unless they were put
>in wrong (which they weren't because the other program works)  I think
>it might be tpscript.  I just got a postscript book on the language and
>will be looking at it.  The program that doesn't run on our machine does
>send the '.......' altogether.  Interesting problem. 

Postscript printers (and their resident fonts) differ, so it's usually a
good idea to redo the width tables from what was distributed.

On a related note, I got a message from Liam Quin where he noted that
periods in odd-sized Courier fonts have "fractional widths", (by which
I think he means that they aren't integers in the ditroff width tables),
and they have to disable their optimizer in such circumstances, otherwise,
troff thought a long string of dots was considerably narrower than the
printer did, and subsequent stuff (though placed correctly) would overlap
the last few dots.  Any [di]troff-based driver for Postscript might
have these problems because it's really difficult to tell whether the
true widths (after scaling to various sizes) varies from the integer
you're able to specify in the width tables.  At least in ditroff
you can adjust the resolution they're at and adjust all of the widths
accordingly.  In psroff (CAT troff-based), I'm stuck with "size of
6 point character in 1/432'nds.  A scaleing that uses truncation can
cause severe munging whereas roundoff doesn't.

>On a different note, I tried to send mail to the author and got no
>response.  Is someone out there keeping this program up to date as
>far as things like this are conserned? Is this something that should
>be fixed?

Not as far as I know.  There are a number of things that could be
tweaked in tpscript to get slight improvements, you might want to
try some of the secondary authors.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: TBA
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