🚀 go-pugleaf

|>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).
|
|That's a kind of strange setup, but by-and-by.
|
|>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.
|
|Your SliTeX might not be the most up to the date. My resent experience
|seem to indicate taht i*.tfm files are also used in SliTeX. splain.fmt and
|slitex binary seem to be the biggest files among TeX/LaTeX package.

As I mentioned, slitex is the same as virtex.

-rwxr-xr-x  4 ken        163840 Apr 15 06:02 /usr/staff/bin/slitex

And it's even big TeX, with over 250k memory words. The beauty of
on-the-fly loading. As for the fmt file:

-rw-r--r--  2 ken        539245 Apr 15 21:05 /usr/lib/tex/macros/slitex.fmt

The tfm files are only about 1k each and there are only 10 or 20 of them.

All this has been standard since about 2.93 or so I think.

|>Besides using standard slitex saves maintainers time because we don't ...
|
|Our sites have hesitated on supporting SliTeX, we can't affort a whole
|crew of system analysts supporting everything from TeX tape. But a device
|driver is must.

A whole crew of SAs? Oh dear, I must be underpaid. :-) To make a slitex
after having made the initex and virtex binaries,

	initex splain '\dump'
	ln splain.fmt slitex.fmt
	ln virtex slitex
	rdist as necessary

All of 3 minutes. And I don't have to recompile initex and virtex
if Lamport changes SliTeX, only if Knuth upgrades tex.web.

|Scaling bitmap fonts is only a remedy, and it works most of times and
|produces much much better results than the best-substituted fonts (
|as most of dvi derivers do -- try the TeX code shown above). However,
|if I could find time, I would get rid of bitmap fonts completely for
|PostScript, and merge MetaFont program and *.base into the device driver
|to make analytical TeX fonts on top of Adobe fonts.

No disagreement here. Turning to more interesting topics perhaps you
can tell us how you smooth the scaled bitmap fonts (I assume you do).
It would be a nice thing for future dvi2ps's to have.

Sideline: There was a lot discussion on TeXHax a while back on METAFONT
vs PS. What more or less emerged from the dust is that one can see the
difference in quality between MF's tailored fonts and PS's optically
scaled fonts if one is fussy. Indeed, I can see some ugliness in the
lower point sized PS fonts. But the pressure of wanting to save on disk
space is in favour of PS fonts at the moment.  It remains to be seen if
some new storage proposals can retain the quality of MF fonts with a
single font description, a la PS.