🚀 go-pugleaf

|I am a little confused. slitex.fmt is dumped by initex and used by virtex
|to create slitex binary that will read this particular slitex.fmt when
|used. slitex.sty and slitex.tex do have some things plain TeX and LaTeX
|do not have, but the key point of slitex is to produce larger fonts and
|blacker characters useable on overhead projector, etc..

At this site virtex, tex, latex, and slitex are all links to one file.
All that is needed to run slitex is slitex.fmt (a.k.a. splain.fmt).

|As far as device drivers are concerned, fmt files do mean anything to them.
|They have to find suitable PK (or GF or PXL) files for the fonts defined
|in fmt, and some of those fonts are not commonly used by regular TeX
|and LaTeX files. Thus, a fmt is not sufficient for the use of SliTeX.

No, of course not. Sorry if I gave the wrong impression. But the disk
space taken is negligible especially as it is spread over all the
workstations served by one file server. Here is the disk usage
for slitex fonts:

943	pk

Actually this is an overestimate because this includes lasy, line and
circle fonts. A mere 1 Mb.

|As far as colors are concerned, bitmap fonts can not change gray levels
|(use half-tune fonts instead), and affordable PostScript printers
|do not have colors (only gray levels that is certainly fewer than 256).
|Most of Adobe fonts can be printed at gray levels (see next release
|of this dvi2ps).

The color layers of SliTeX are for overlays, not color printers.
Overlays can be used independent of whether you actually have color
transparencies.  We can also use the Adobe fonts in our dvi2ps. Both
features are useful.

|In academic environments, I can imagine the need to have too many fancy
|features for slides, instead, time is the most precious thing. Is is
|always easy to convert a LaTeX file into a SliTeX file?

Fiducial marks are very useful when you want to quickly align overlaid
slides.

Slides are usually done separately anyway because of the telegraphic
style of communication. It is generally a mistake to put more than 10
to 12 lines of text on a slide and some people would say even that is
too much. So many times I have seen illegible tables of results at
presentations. Who can read those anyway? Make graphs or say "trust me,
I did get these results".  So making a slide file afresh is easier than
trying to reuse some nice sentences out of the paper.

Besides using standard slitex saves maintainers time because we don't
have to document how to bend latex to do slides. Slitex is documented
in the book.

I'm not saying magnified and/or PS fonts are a bad thing, but it isn't
necessary to promote them by saying that you do away with slitex. Our
ditroff users use 24-36 pt ditroff fonts for slides and they are happy
too.