At 14:22 -0800 2007/03/10, Oleg Kobchenko wrote:
A good example of typesetting APL is Dictionary of APL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/36983.36984 Does anybody know, What font was used to typeset DoA and is this font available as METAFONT or Type 1 font, free or not?
I believe that DoA was typeset using my Type 1 PS APL font that evolved from my paper "APL pi" at APL/81 - It has been made available in various forms over the years, some paid for, mostly free. Even though I was a student in the first ever MF class taught by Donald Knuth, Charles Bigelow, and Richard Southall (Spring semester 1984 at Stanford), I didn't use METAFONT to do the APL font, but instead Fontographer on a Mac. I say "I believe" above, because I'm relying on memory since I don't have subscription access to the DoA on the ACM site. A sure sign that it was my font is the vertical placement of the Greek letters - I had them on the "function center" so that expressions like <alpha> + <omega> aligned vertically. This was always a controversial choice, and perhaps even more argued was my choice of italic (rather than slanted) lower case alphabetics... Certainly my font was the one used in Eugene McDonnell's "Life: Nasty, Brutish, and Short". As I said above, various people have asked (and received) permission to use and distribute my fonts - some have modified them, e.g. to use slanted (or even upright) Roman letters. I don't understand your remark, "PDFs end up as pixelated Type 3." PostScript Type 3 fonts are not pixels - but they are a "more open" version of Type 1 (and don't have as many parameters such as hinting etc.) All of this discussion, and the folks (e.g. Roger and Devon) who wince at the difficulty of displaying old papers are the things Ken thought a lot about when he made the tough decision to leave the lovely APL symbols behind. Practicality over esthetics... - joey ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
