🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug31.151151.8593@vax.oxford.ac.uk>, atmos@vax.oxford.ac.uk
writes:
| I am having a few problems matching the slant of 10pt Slanted Roman 
| characters (cmsl10) to that of the 10pt Text Italics (cmti10). 
| 
| This is all because I do not like the italic number 4 and I want to replace 
| it with a slanted Roman 4 instead, in headers etc. 
| 
| I have been experimenting with the \fontdimen parameters, but they appear to
| have no effect. Am I missing the point? 

Yes.  The slant was set when the fonts were produced.  You can no more change
the slant of the bitmaps than you could change the slant of the italic charac-
ters on an IBM typeball.

The \fontdimen parameter that measures slant reports the value that was used
when the font was created.  You can change it, but that just amounts to
telling TeX to ignore reality and use THIS number.

I suspect you are used to Postcript, which can create modified fonts on the
fly from the basic outline descriptions.  TeX fonts are bitmaps and are not
modifiable.  (Yes, there are TeX-to-Postscript DVI drivers, so you could have
TeX use a "re-slanted" version of an outline-defined version of cmsl or cmti,
if you had them.  However, you would need some extrinsic mechanism for telling
the printer (driver to tell the printer) to do this for you, and some mecha-
nism for building an appropriate TFM file to tell TeX about the resulting
character parameters.  Just changing the slant would likely not give you
decent results - the actual character width and height change when you "re-
slant" them, so TeX would place them incorrectly.)
							-- Jerry