🚀 go-pugleaf

If you are trying to make page-high letters, you're
not setting type anymore, you're making a picture.
Therefore, it is unreasonable to expect text processing
programs to handle this gracefully. I doubt that
you can do it with Metafont because of the memory
limitations, not to mention the biggest legal integer
is 4096. (But you could ask for magstep 50, perhaps.)

Using the PostScript fonts, as Ken suggested, isprobably
easiest.

I read a preprint of Richard Rubinstein's book, and
thought it was an excellent introduction to the subject
of digital type. It was certainly a little simplistic
in places, but that's only to be expected from an
introductory book. (Especially the type design issues,
I thought.) The illustrations seemed good, although of
course I was looking at a xerox of a xerox of a...
I'm not sure if a book like this, a general survey
of the field has been written before. I'd highly recommend
it if you have only used word processing programs say,
or Macintosh ``publishing'', and want to get a better
grasp on what you're really doing and the programs you're
invoking and the letters you're printing.

In a third unrelated topic, does anyone know the relative
frequency of all the letters and word lengths? I know
the first are ``etaion shrdlu'', from Fredric Brown's
story, but what of the rest?

Karl.    karl@umb.edu    ...!harvard!umb!karl