🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Dec28.195703.2749@cbnewsl.att.com> npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) writes:

[Re: DWB 3.2 support for Latin-1]

>Our plan would be to provide support for the European standard
>(ISO 8859-1) character set only with the PostScript postprocessor,
>dpost.  The reason is that the HP LaserJet requires host-resident
>fonts, in bitmap form, for every point size. The size of the
>font support for the LaserJet is already several megabytes,
>and the additional characters would add considerably. I'm not
>sure where we'd get the bitmaps from, either.

>PostScript already provides most if not all of the additional
>characters-- they are already in the printer, we only have to
>generate the name or position of the character in dpost.
>So, my question is, have the Europeans settled on PostScript as
>a standard for printers, or is there something else we should
>be supporting?
>(Special note to HP LaserJet owners: as you may already know,
>for US $700 you can add a PostScript cartridge to your LaserJet II.
>In addition to the added flexibility of PostScript you will
>probably recover your investment with the disk space you save
>when you rm the LaserJet bitmaps!)

I get my revenge...  Oh so sweet.

Psroff has solved most of these difficulties, and I would have made
them available as source for AT&T to use, but somehow "Chris Lewis
doesn't feel that way".  Nyah, nyah ;-)

[Ronald Khoo was right, you should be careful about egregarious misquoting
of guys like me.  What goes around comes around.]

But, I'm a nice guy, so I'll tell you how to solve your problems anyways:

    Font compression of HP SFP's (native HP PCL fonts):
	- compress (the PD one which I believe is now almost POSIX
	  required aside from the copyright issue which is still with
	  us.)
	- TeX PK format (compress won't compress them)
	These are the sizes of a Helvetica font at 10 point in three different
	formats (H.10.sfp doesn't have the full Latin-1 set, but it should
	be reasonably close):
	    -rw-r--r--  1 clewis  users      3988 Jul 28 23:42 H.10.pk
	    -rw-r--r--  1 clewis  users     10241 Dec 29 12:57 H.10.sfp
	    -rw-r--r--  1 clewis  users      5149 Dec 29 12:57 H.10.sfp.Z
	Normally, psroff is told whether to look for a ".pk" or ".sfp"
	font file for a given font at a specific size.  However, psroff's
	font reader doesn't care whether the file it finds is PK or SFP
	because you can tell from the first byte whether it's a SFP or
	PK, and the reader automatically switches to the right decoding
	software.  If psroff can't find a file with the .pk or .sfp suffix,
	it automatically checks for a tacked on ".Z", and will popen a
	zcat (compress -dc) if it finds one to read and decode the font file.

	Psroff actually maintains the font internally as more of a PK
	format, but will read the SFP as a variant of the "unpacked PK"
	format.  Of course, the emission of the font is in SFP format.
	(Does DWB's 3.1 LJ emitter support incremental downloading?
	Psroff and jetroff does)

	The compression variant is really easy for you to encorporate
	into DWB 3.2.  You could ship the fonts entirely compressed, and
	then tell the customer to uncompress those fonts that are used a
	lot to eliminate the performance hit of decompression most of
	the time, but still have the full set available for immediate
	use.  Psroff users haven't complained to me about the
	performance of this.  (They did about other stuff, but I've
	fixed that).

	The PK to SFP conversion isn't that easy (unless you steal
	psroff source).

	Standalone programs to convert PK's to SFP's (including
	changing the mappings) is included with psroff (SoftQuad is
	using a version of this software with my blessing to create
	some of the fonts they distribute).  Jetroff includes a program
	to convert SFP's to PK's which I use to create the PK format fonts I
	distribute with psroff.

    Font/code sources:
	1 HP has sets of at least Roman and Helvetica at the sizes you'll
	  need.  (They seem to be discontinuing the floppy version however.
	  I know that they have Latin-1 symbol sets, but I don't know whether
	  they're currently available on floppy).  Maybe you can do a deal
	  with them.  These are VERY good-looking fonts - to my eye they look
	  nicer than the LaserWriter's Postscript fonts.
	2 TeX PK's are available that have most of the characters you
	  need (eg: the University of Toronto distribution).  Psroff has
	  facilities to search for and merge/remap these files into SFP's.
	  ("buildfonts")
	3 The freeware/shareware version of jetroff had PK's that buildfonts
	  works with.
	4 The commercial version of Jetroff has similar PK's and might
	  have the Latin-1 extensions too.
	5 METAFONT.

"cm" PK fonts are rather ugly, but there are other fonts available that
look nicer (eg: the am or jetroff's jm)

The fonts that come with psroff for laserjets are built out of 2 and 3
(indirectly 5 of course), and I know of people using psroff with 1 and 4.
And a few people have parts of the Latin-1 set working thru psroff.
(I'm working on full support for them - thanks for eliciting the
paper on the subject from the net).

One thing you should be very aware of is that the HP Laserjet III has
font scaling built in, and you can get a CG Times and Universal at any
size you want out of them, just by requesting them by characteristic.
You should support this.  Psroff does, but I don't have the width table
issue sorted out quite yet.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541
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