Re: Text appearance (was Re: Object-Oriented Programming?)

[Jamie Webb <j@...>]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2005 at 05:32:06PM -0800, Mark Hamburg wrote:
> I suspect that the issue is the TeX "computer modern" fonts. They are
> bitmaps optimized for printers and hence don't display well on computer
> screens. Acrobat at least used to do a poor job with them as well. I assume
> that the reason some tools do better is that those tools special case these
> fonts and substitute something better.

The bitmaps are actually at sufficiently high resolution that
displaying them on a screen nicely is not a problem at all. They don't
look quite as nice as vector-based fonts when rendered with
Ghostscript just because no-one's taken the time to write hinting
algorithms for bitmapped fonts, but they are quite readable. If you
zoom in enough, you can see the jaggies.

The horrible mess Acrobat makes of displaying these fonts is entirely
Acrobat's fault: it downsamples all bitmaps to an apparently arbitrary
resolution (typically lower than, and not divisible into, that of your
screen) before displaying them, for no obvious reason.

Of course, if authors would just update their TeX installations, they'd
get shiny new postscript versions of the CMR fonts...

-- Jamie Webb