On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Marcus Beyer wrote:
> And one step further: Why should LyX support bitmap fonts?
Do you mean the editing (in LyX window) fonts or the resulting document
file fonts?
Editing fonts:
- not everybody may have outline fonts (esp. older XFree
distributions)
- bitmap fonts are generally _better_, if they are not scaled.
- Supporting also bitmap fonts is very minimum effort, both
use the standard Xlib font API.
- Outline font support might be buggy. For example, for some
TrueType fonts my xfstt server crashes.
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?).
So when outputting PostScript file from TeX, the fonts have generally been
converted to bitmaps. The native TeX document format, dvi, doesn't contain
bitmap fonts. When dvi and TeX were done, there was no Postscript (AFAIK).
> 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).
> 2. The target document becomes device dependent.
It's not really device dependent, it just supports some devices (with
right resolution) better than others. If the bitmap fonts are in high
resolution, it isn't _that_ awful to scale them, especially by some
small integer factor (granted, outline fonts are nevertheless better).
