Fonts?

Fonts?

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

Hi again,

I'm integrating variable-width glyphs (until now I'd hard-coded
Courier).  First off, they look great.  I'll post some samples when I
polish some remaining nits (forgot to update hspan() and vspan()).

My question follows.

Which font do you suggest I use for the hard-coded font value?
Whatever's chosen, I'll need a suitable AFM for the WX value.

Right now I'm using the Charter font found in

  /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 (use X11R7 for NetBSD).

It's a decent serif.

Suggestions?

Thanks,

Kristaps
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Re: Fonts?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Kristaps,

> Which font do you suggest I use for the hard-coded font value?

Basically, i don't know anything about fonts and don't care
either, except that:

 * Please make sure to use something which is guaranteed to be
   available everywhere by default without requiring users to
   install anything, or if such stuff does not exist, use
   generic settings if feasible.  I will never feed any font-
   related arguments, options or parameters into mandoc and
   will never set up any font-related configuration files,
   and if mandoc ever asks me any questions about fonts or
   produces any font-related error messages, i will get
   really upset.

 * Please do not use anything fancy, neither from the point of
   view of design, nor from a technical point of view.  Just use
   the most standard and boring stuff you can find.

I would also suggest not to waste any time on fonts,
but of course that is your call.  I don't see the point of
making anything about fonts configurable.  We are not in
marketing, we are formatting manuals!

> Whatever's chosen, I'll need a suitable AFM for the WX value.

No idea what you are talking about.

Yours,
  Ingo
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Re: Fonts?

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

Ingo,

>> Which font do you suggest I use for the hard-coded font value?
> 
> Basically, i don't know anything about fonts and don't care
> either, except that:
> 
>  * Please make sure to use something which is guaranteed to be
>    available everywhere by default without requiring users to
>    install anything, or if such stuff does not exist, use
>    generic settings if feasible.  I will never feed any font-
>    related arguments, options or parameters into mandoc and
>    will never set up any font-related configuration files,
>    and if mandoc ever asks me any questions about fonts or
>    produces any font-related error messages, i will get
>    really upset.

mandoc needs hard-coded glyph widths (font-metrics) or you'll get
exactly these configuration questions.  Same goes with my question about
dimensions and margins.  This all happens Magically (TM) in groff.

Your test with gv is the first time somebody's given independent
feedback, so it's not fair to get angry (yet :-)).  The gv problems are
with a lack of hinting in the PostScript file and unrelated to fonts.
I'm missing some sort of mysterious declaration.  These are technically
comments in the PostScript file (!) so it's hard to find which one's
missing.

Hint:  does /anybody/ know PostScript well enough to sanity-check the
files mandoc is generating?

You may not use the PostScript driver--I don't either--but when I first
announced mandoc for both OpenBSD and NetBSD the first complaints were
that it doesn't have -Tps.  Obviously somebody cares or I wouldn't be
doing this.  If in fact nobody does care, a lot of time (and Google's
money) are being spent for naught.

>  * Please do not use anything fancy, neither from the point of
>    view of design, nor from a technical point of view.  Just use
>    the most standard and boring stuff you can find.

Proportional widths are the standard as defined by troff/groff.  If
monospace and un-styled (italic/oblique, bold) were good enough, we
could just stick with mandoc | col -b and read the text file.

> I would also suggest not to waste any time on fonts,
> but of course that is your call.  I don't see the point of
> making anything about fonts configurable.  We are not in
> marketing, we are formatting manuals!

For the record, term_ps.c is pretty much as "complicated" as it's going
to get.  All that I'll add to it is a vspan() function and some smarts
as to the current font mode with respect to glyph width, which will seep
into term.c in a trivially mechanical fashion.  My questions on layouts,
even with fancy two-page output, are trivial to implement.

Thanks,

Kristaps
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Re: Fonts?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Kristaps,

Kristaps Dzonsons schrieb am Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 04:15:54PM +0200:

> mandoc needs hard-coded glyph widths (font-metrics) or you'll get
> exactly these configuration questions.  Same goes with my question
> about dimensions and margins.

Aha.  So i understand you need to settle on a specific default font.
So be it...

> Your test with gv is the first time somebody's given independent
> feedback, so it's not fair to get angry (yet :-)).

Don't worry, I won't get angry about bugs, and I won't get angry
about experimentation with different design decisions either;
i might only get angry should the final design decisions turn
out, in the long run, to be constant sources of trouble.  :)

> The gv problems are with a lack of hinting in the PostScript file
> and unrelated to fonts.

All the better!

[...]
> You may not use the PostScript driver--I don't either--but when I first
> announced mandoc for both OpenBSD and NetBSD the first complaints were
> that it doesn't have -Tps.  Obviously somebody cares or I wouldn't be
> doing this.  If in fact nobody does care, a lot of time (and Google's
> money) are being spent for naught.

Don't worry!  Quite a few people do care, for example at least five
OpenBSD developers, probably more.

To be honest, right now, almost everybody considers ASCII rendering
issues more pressing then improved PostScript support, but as long
as we also get -Tascii up to OpenBSD quality standards in time for the
4.8 release, there is nothing wrong with developing -Tps in parallel.
Eventually, it will be a big asset.

> For the record, term_ps.c is pretty much as "complicated" as it's going
> to get.

I do not worry that much about a bit of additional code, in particular
when it is well modularized in *ps*.c files.  We need what we need.
Of course, bloat should be avoided, but it does not look like
anybody round here is prone to producing bloat.

Yours,
  Ingo
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Re: Fonts?

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

>> The gv problems are with a lack of hinting in the PostScript file
>> and unrelated to fonts.
> 
> All the better!

Better: fixed!  Was forgotting to make a conversion from AFM units back
into PostScript points.  Will test some more and commit in a few
minutes.  I've just tested on gv(1) and gs(1) without issue.
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Re: Fonts?

[Dieter Baron]

hi,
   
> > Which font do you suggest I use for the hard-coded font value?
>  
> Basically, i don't know anything about fonts and don't care
> either, except that:
> 
>  * Please make sure to use something which is guaranteed to be
>    available everywhere by default without requiring users to
>    install anything, or if such stuff does not exist, use
>    generic settings if feasible.  I will never feed any font-
>    related arguments, options or parameters into mandoc and
>    will never set up any font-related configuration files,
>    and if mandoc ever asks me any questions about fonts or
>    produces any font-related error messages, i will get
>    really upset.
  
  Fear not, that is my goal (and Kristaps, I presume) as well.  Using
either Times or Palatino ensures the font's availability on any sane
PostScript (or PDF) viewer.  (Any PostScript viewer that doesn't
include these two fonts would have problems displaying heaps of other
documents as well.)
  
>  * Please do not use anything fancy, neither from the point of
>    view of design, nor from a technical point of view.  Just use
>    the most standard and boring stuff you can find.
  
  The most boring stuff would be Times, which is a good default, I
guess. 
  
> I would also suggest not to waste any time on fonts,
> but of course that is your call.  I don't see the point of  
> making anything about fonts configurable.  We are not in
> marketing, we are formatting manuals!
  
  For now, one hardcoded font is certainly fine.  However, I do see an
argument for making fonts selectable at run time: embedding the
resulting pages in a larger work, so they fit with the layout of other
parts of that work (e.g. book).  But let's not worry about that at the
moment.
  
> > Whatever's chosen, I'll need a suitable AFM for the WX value.
> 
> No idea what you are talking about.
  
  Font metrics: how wide each char is, so they can be placed
correctly, and line breaks can be made at the right points.
  
  
  I'm confident that my know how in this area (typography and
PostScript) is sufficient to solve these problems.  However, I can't
reply to mails with the speed you two display.  So, please be patient,
and give me at least two days to reply.
  
                                        yours,
                                        dillo
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Re: Fonts?

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 502 bytes --]

>   Fear not, that is my goal (and Kristaps, I presume) as well.  Using
> either Times or Palatino ensures the font's availability on any sane
> PostScript (or PDF) viewer.  (Any PostScript viewer that doesn't
> include these two fonts would have problems displaying heaps of other
> documents as well.)

Enclosed is the Times version.  This checked by myself (OpenBSD gs(1) 
and gv(1)) and M. Deksters (Mac OSX, whatever the hell it uses).

If you're using gv(1), it looks much better anti-aliased...

[-- Attachment #2: mandoc.1.ps --]
[-- Type: application/postscript, Size: 47813 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #3: mdoc.7.ps --]
[-- Type: application/postscript, Size: 242304 bytes --]

Re: Fonts?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Dieter,

>   Fear not, that is my goal (and Kristaps, I presume) as well.  Using
> either Times or Palatino ensures the font's availability on any sane
> PostScript (or PDF) viewer.

Sounds good.

>   For now, one hardcoded font is certainly fine.  However, I do see an
> argument for making fonts selectable at run time: embedding the
> resulting pages in a larger work, so they fit with the layout of other
> parts of that work (e.g. book).  But let's not worry about that at the
> moment.

Hm, yes, maybe.

Thanks for your explanations!

>   I'm confident that my know how in this area (typography and
> PostScript) is sufficient to solve these problems.  However, I can't
> reply to mails with the speed you two display.  So, please be patient,
> and give me at least two days to reply.

Oh, don't worry, that's only because we are at hackathon speed.
Usually, i'm not that fast at responding either.

Yours,
  Ingo
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Re: Fonts?

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 845 bytes --]

>> Which font do you suggest I use for the hard-coded font value?
>> Whatever's chosen, I'll need a suitable AFM for the WX value.
> 
>   Times or Palatino.  Both come with PostScript printers and PDF viewers, so you don't have to embed them.  And both come with italic and bold.
> 
>   You can either use the AFM files that come with the replacement fonts from ghostscript (they should be compatible, metrics-wise), or I can send you the original Adobe AFM files.  If I recall correctly, they are (were?) free.

Dieter, please do.

Enclosed is a fully proportional-width PostScript file using Charter (as
found in the aforementioned directory).  Quite nice, no?

For the time being, I absolutely need the AFM files to get the glyph
widths.  I don't want to be parsing font files with each invocation
until we really have to.

Thanks,

Kristaps

[-- Attachment #2: mandoc.1.ps --]
[-- Type: application/postscript, Size: 49133 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #3: mdoc.7.ps --]
[-- Type: application/postscript, Size: 249843 bytes --]

Re: Fonts?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Kristaps,

Kristaps Dzonsons wrote on Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 03:21:23PM +0200:

> Enclosed is a fully proportional-width PostScript file using Charter
> (as found in the aforementioned directory).  Quite nice, no?

I fear something is seriously broken with those two files mandoc.1.ps
and mdoc.7.ps.  When i fire up gv on a standard OpenBSD install,
it does not display any text.

Running them through ps2pdf, i do see the text in xpdf, but that's
exactly the kind of jumping through hoops i don't want to see.
Please don't tell me i need to install or configure anything.
If it doesn't work out of the box *everywhere*, i consider it
broken.  If you think you must make anything configurable about
fonts, make sure the burden of configuration is put on those people
who care, not on those who don't.

Yours,
  Ingo
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Re: Fonts?

[Jason McIntyre]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 03:25:26PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi Kristaps,
> 
> Kristaps Dzonsons wrote on Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 03:21:23PM +0200:
> 
> > Enclosed is a fully proportional-width PostScript file using Charter
> > (as found in the aforementioned directory).  Quite nice, no?
> 
> I fear something is seriously broken with those two files mandoc.1.ps
> and mdoc.7.ps.  When i fire up gv on a standard OpenBSD install,
> it does not display any text.
> 

don;t know if it's related or not, but i eventually gave up on gv as
being too problematic, and now use xpdf. it's an ugly interface, but it
does seem to display pages that gv has issues with. so the problem might
be gv, not the ps files.

jmc
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Re: Fonts?

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

>>> Enclosed is a fully proportional-width PostScript file using Charter
>>> (as found in the aforementioned directory).  Quite nice, no?
>> I fear something is seriously broken with those two files mandoc.1.ps
>> and mdoc.7.ps.  When i fire up gv on a standard OpenBSD install,
>> it does not display any text.
>>
> 
> don;t know if it's related or not, but i eventually gave up on gv as
> being too problematic, and now use xpdf. it's an ugly interface, but it
> does seem to display pages that gv has issues with. so the problem might
> be gv, not the ps files.

Hmm.  I used gs(1) and they look fine on OpenBSD.  This is why I asked
about fonts---I'm trying to find one that's distributed on all systems.
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Re: Fonts?

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

>> don;t know if it's related or not, but i eventually gave up on gv as
>> being too problematic, and now use xpdf. it's an ugly interface, but it
>> does seem to display pages that gv has issues with. so the problem might
>> be gv, not the ps files.
> 
> Hmm.  I used gs(1) and they look fine on OpenBSD.  This is why I asked
> about fonts---I'm trying to find one that's distributed on all systems.

...I don't see anything under gv(1) either until I unchecked "respect
document structure".  That's most peculiar.  I'll look into the PS I'm
generating (I wish it were more specific...) to find where it's erring.
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Re: Fonts?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Kristaps and Jason,

Kristaps Dzonsons wrote on Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 03:38:55PM +0200:
> Jason McIntyre wrote:
>> Ingo Schwarze wrote:
>>> Kristaps wrote:

>>>> Enclosed is a fully proportional-width PostScript file using Charter
>>>> (as found in the aforementioned directory).  Quite nice, no?

>>> I fear something is seriously broken with those two files mandoc.1.ps
>>> and mdoc.7.ps.  When i fire up gv on a standard OpenBSD install,
>>> it does not display any text.

>> don;t know if it's related or not, but i eventually gave up on gv as
>> being too problematic, and now use xpdf. it's an ugly interface, but it
>> does seem to display pages that gv has issues with. so the problem might
>> be gv, not the ps files.

> Hmm.  I used gs(1) and they look fine on OpenBSD.  This is why I asked
> about fonts---I'm trying to find one that's distributed on all systems.

When whatever choice was made causes discussions,
i consider the choice probably too fancy.

Sorry i can't come up with constructive suggestions on how to proceed.
Is there a way to just say "use whatever is available"?  If so, that
might be a sane default.  If not, i don't know.  I'm willing to
naively look at whatever you plan on doing, but of course, it should
not just work on the system i happen to have right now, but it should
be reliable for everyone.

I don't know how, but i guess reliability can be achieved.  For example,
i have been using a2ps for nearly two decades, and i have often copied
the output around across various systems, and i can't remember ever
having had any issues displaying them on the screen or printing them
on whatever hardware.

By the way, when i run your files through pdf2ps and then back
through ps2pdf, i can look at them.  That approach increases the
size by a factor of four, but it looks like the PostScript can be
made more reliable.

Yours,
  Ingo
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[FIXED] Re: Fonts?

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 114 bytes --]

These are the fixed PostScript files as of the last commit.  Tested in
gv(1) and gs(1) on GNU/Linux and OpenBSD.


[-- Attachment #2: mandoc.1.ps --]
[-- Type: application/postscript, Size: 49105 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #3: mdoc.7.ps --]
[-- Type: application/postscript, Size: 249817 bytes --]