🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jan2.000547.15295@csis.dit.csiro.au> ken@csis.dit.csiro.au (Ken Yap) writes:
>In article <PCG.90Dec31155754@teachk.cs.aber.ac.uk>:
>>Ditroff though avoids even this negligible source of errors by being
>>parametric with respect to the actual hirzontal and vertical resolutions
>>of the intended output device, and ensuring that all motions and sizes
>>are in fact even multiples of these resolutions, and by declaring in its
>>output for which resolutions all motions and sizes are meant.

>Perhaps, but ditroff format (at least the one I worked with) has its
>limitations too. When I wrote the ditdvi converter I rediscovered that
>widths have to under 256 because they are stored as one byte in the
>fontdesc file. This means that everything has to be scaled so that the
>widest character is under 256 units. This is another source of
>quantization error when adapting to real-world devices.

True, but a trifle misleading.  Normally, the width entries in the width
tables is the width of the character in the printer's resolution at
a given size.  Eg: width of character in 1/300's at 10 point.  Given that
the printer is probably going to insist on integral pixel widths anyways
(and integral pixel glyphs for certain), you won't get much in the way of
quantization errors.  ditroff is usually running in the same resolution as
the device, and since the widths are in that same resolution, characters start
on pixel boundaries and things usually look pretty good.  In contrast,
severe braindamage can result if you scale bitmap fonts to sizes other
than what they were designed for.

Only on high resolution devices (>= 2000 DPI perhaps) is the 255 limit likely
to be a problem.

>In practice I have found TeX's spacing and placement decisions to be
>superior to *roff's. So I'm biased. :-)

Which is certainly true.  Another niceish thing is that TeX doesn't automatically
assume that a 12 point font is twice the width of a 6 point one.  This means
that you can deal with fonts that don't scale linearly (eg: you've collected
a font at it's various sizes and there's roundoff error).

Still, troff does do a quite reasonable job.

>Again, the real point is that there is no technical hindrance to using
>TeX for man pages. Somebody just has to put in the work in macros and
>backends.

No real technical hindrance, just disk space, CPU cycles, compatibility and
learning curve.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541
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