🚀 go-pugleaf

> [TeX's] typographic and
> font capabilities (at least, insofar as I am aware, which isn't
> as far as it might be) are far too limited for our purposes.

I'm not sure I understand you.  TeX can use any PostScript font (as long as
you are prepared to print the result on a PostScript device), and it can
also use Bitstream fonts (with the help of a package from Personal TeX Inc
to convert Bitstream outlines to the bitmaps that TeX understands). That
should give you enough fonts to be getting on with.

As for typographic capabilities... TeX isn't much good for fancy page
makeup, with text flowing around diagrams etc. (TeX's linebreaking and
pagebreaking algorithms act asynchronously; TeX builds paragraphs and adds
them to a `scroll', every now and then cutting off enough for a page.  When
a paragraph is made into lines, TeX doesn't `know' where it will go on the
page and so can't change the line lengths accordingly. TeX *can* handle
page makeup where all parts of the text are the same width--for example,
for a grid-oriented layout--because this does fit into its `scroll' model.)

Jeremy

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|  Jeremy Gibbons (jg@prg.oxford.ac.uk)   Funky Monkey Multimedia Corp  |
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