>>From: Marcus Beyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 19:47:02 +0100
>>Cc: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Paul E Johnson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>To: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>Subject: Re: wish for LyX 1.2
>>
>>
>>> Do you mean the editing (in LyX window) fonts
>>> or the resulting document file fonts?
>>
>>The latter. I am sorry for being unprecise here! So anew:
>>
>>My wish for LyX 1.2:
>>Please remove the support for bitmap fonts in target documents!
>>
>>juh> Its a joke, isn't it?
>>
>>Not at all. But it's fun (discussing about it) :-)
>>
>>> What comes to document file fonts, its mainly not up to LyX, since it is
>>> TeX that does the typesetting. And in fact, _all_ fonts in TeX are
>>> scalable "outline" fonts. The problem is not that, but the fact that TeX
>>> fonts are difficult to convert into PostScript/PDF fonts (althought work
>>> is done here, maybe it is possible nowadays?).
>>
>>Isn't it LyX who tells TeX & friends what to do?
>>IMHO the easiest solution would be:
>>Let the user choose between "pslatex" and "ae,aecompl" etc.
>>
>>> > 1. Almost every new LyX user has to make the "ugly-fonts-experience".
>>>
>>> Not really, just don't use Acroread which is proprietary software anyway
>>> and shouldn't be used. Acroread isn't installed by default anyway on most
>>> Linux distributions, but gv is (which displays bitmap fonts just fine).
>>
>>I use Acroread instead of gv, because:
>>1. AFAIK gv does not support bookmarks, which do help a lot.
>>2. When I see what extremely slow gv displays my bitmap pictures,
>> I have the very bad feeling that they are converted into _huge_
>> Postscript pictures. Bad for the resources, even for printing.
For screen consultation, latex2html or similar is better IMHO , PDF
is rather useful for printing (where the font rendering is OK).
>>
>>But it doesn't really make it better I do not use Acroread,
>>because it is the "default" viewer for the rest of the world.
>>So it is even worse for the user, when his/her documents
>>look good for him, but ugly for the world.
>>
>>> > 2. The target document becomes device dependent.
>>
>>JMarc> That's only for PDF. So what you are after is "improve PDF support"
>>
>>No. For Postscript it's the same: The resolution of printers differ!
>>
>>> It's not really device dependent, it just supports some devices (with
>>> right resolution) better than others.
>>
>>nice :-))
>>_That_ is exactly what I call "device dependent".
>>Should the user know about the resolution of the devices?
Sure, a user who doesn't know the difference between screen
and printer resolution will provide lousy stuff to others
one day or another. More generally
- either he is admin of his facilities, and he will need to know
to install (La)TeX;
- or he is in a team, where someone takes cares of this (hopefully).
>>Should the user "compile" his document anew,
>>when he wants to use another printer?
No, the dvi idea is: do not recompile, just
run dvips with another driver and leave the work to
Metafont...This works also to build intermediate font sizes
by resizing at dvips step (dvips is VERY powerful).
>>Citation from www.lyx.org: "LyX lets you concentrate on writing [...]"
See above about dissociation between admin/style/... maintenance and
text writing: if a class is strict about everything in the
Layout->Document popup, the choices there should be ineffective.
Something like novice/expert in the xemacs hm-html mode,
allowing to set some kind of line between typography hacking and
plain use of LyX.
But I guess that developers have discussed thes point already...
>>
>>> (granted, outline fonts are nevertheless better).
>>
>>So where do we disagree?
On minor points of document presentation for others, I guess
on which there is much to say
- because LyX/(La)TeX allows to do something really effective
(and batch, very useful in intranet service);
- because one of the foundations on which TeX lies is the direct re-use
of existing postscript stuff, not very efficient with bitmapped postscript
(but frankly, with no resize of these bitmaps and ps2pdf of the
resulting postscript, you can have a result similar in size - with
no bookmarks, but who cares about page layout to navigate a big
document ? again, goto html, you get real world hypertext there).
Just to substantiate the discussion :-)
--
Jean-Pierre
