home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- PSROFF RELEASE 3.0 LJIII 1.2 91/04/05
-
- Feb 19, 1991
- Chris Lewis
-
- This file describes some of the differences between the "lj" and "lj3"
- variants of psroff, and how you can make your older laserjet work
- better with better fonts. The LASERFONTS file describes how to use
- TeX fonts to build reasonably useful fonts for laserjets. This file
- describes the lj3 structure using the scalable typefaces on the lj3,
- and how this can be ported back to dumber laserjets.
-
- The original laserjet support in psroff is based upon commonly available
- font sets from HP. Which predated the Laserjet III. This mechanism
- was based upon the Math-8 and Roman-8 symbol set. To make things simpler,
- because Math-8 itself is a little rare, psroff includes a "Math-8" set
- that has been synthesized from TeX fonts at each of the 14 CAT troff
- sizes. For best results you also need a set of the Roman, Italic
- and Bold fonts at the same sizes. In Psroff, there is included a Roman
- Italic and Bold font at 10 points for you to play with.
-
- However, since then the Laserjet III was released by HP. There
- are two fundamental changes that this printer introduced: the first being
- that the printer contains scalable typefaces. Thus, psroff can treat
- it almost like a Postscript printer, and not download at all. The
- other being that these scalable typefaces and an IBM PC program
- to generate SFP's (HP Soft font format) at any given size is being
- sold as a quite inexpensive product. It allows you to buy the
- HPLJ III fonts and build a complete set of softfonts for your older
- printer.
-
- Further, the "DeskTop" symbolset available on LJIII's is a better match
- to what CAT Troff needs, so this is used instead of Roman-8 for the LJIII.
-
- LJIII Structure:
-
- There are two sets of widths for LJIII's, "lj3" and "lj3u". The former
- has the Times font for R, I, B, X and S (Upright, Italic, Bold, BoldItalic
- and Symbol), and the latter has Univers for R, I, B, X and S. When the
- font tables are built, the Times widths are cross-linked into the Univers
- area as TR, TI, TB and TX. Similarly, the Univers fonts are cross-linked
- into the Roman area as UR, UI, UB and UX. The Times S font is not available
- under Univers and vice-versa because troff can't handle two separate S fonts.
- This permits you to select what your base fonts should be, whether Times or
- Univers, at the same time the other fonts can be selected with ".fp"'s with
- the appropriate T or U prefix. There are separate entries in the psrofflib
- file (selectable by different -T arguments to psroff) to select whether
- you want your base font as Times or Univers.
-
- If you wish to add additional scalable typefaces, you should probably
- build a new family directory (widthlj3?), place the width files there,
- and modify the Makefile to cross-link these files into widthlj3 and
- widthlj3u. Then add a new entry into psrofflib to use the new widths.
-
- At present, there is no easy way to build width tables for extra scalable
- fonts - the supplied widths were built by an eclectic mix of perl and C
- programs on several different machines using the font metric files available
- from HP. N.K. Krishnan (of HP, krishnan@iag.hp.com, did a lot of the hard
- work) and I could probably never reproduce the same set of steps again.
- Perhaps the simplest thing to do would be to copy an existing set and manually
- tweak them using the test sheet as a guide.
-
- Zapf-Dingbats Cartridge/S2 font:
-
- There is a scalable font cartridge that contains Zapf-Dingbats. This
- fonts contains *real* \(bs, \(lh and \(rh. The default psroff setup
- is to use a "sun" for bs, and =>/<= for rh/lh. If you *really* want to
- use the "real" glyphs, you have to obtain the cartridge and follow these
- steps:
- - edit lj3.fonts and lj3u.fonts and uncomment the 3 lines in
- each that refer to bs/lh/rh. This is described more precisely
- in lj3[u].fonts.
- - edit widths/widthlj3/S and widths/widthlj3u/S and *remove*
- the three lines pertaining to bs, lh and rh.
- - edit widths/widthlj3/DESC and widths/widthlj3u/DESC and
- change the line:
- fonts 5 R I B X S
- to:
- fonts 6 R I B X S S2
-
- Using Scaled fonts on non-LJIII's:
-
- If you obtain the scalable typefaces and the PC program, you can
- use the program to generate SFP's for each typeface at the CAT
- troff sizes. You will want to build these fonts as Roman-8
- symbolsets. Then, copy these files from your PC to your UNIX system
- that's running psroff. (Don't forget to copy the files in *binary*
- mode!!!). Follow the instructions in LASERFONTS on how to build
- and install these fonts and the new width tables etc. Without some
- work you will not be able to use a MATH-8 font produced in this way
- without borrowing some of the overrides from lj3.fonts into lj.fonts.
-