printer fonts

[miller@GEM.cam.nist.gov (Bruce R. Miller)]

    Date: Tue, 12 Feb 91 16:25:44 EST
    From: bart@nynexst.com (Bart Burns)

    How can I create a font (with the font editor) and use it with the printer?
	...
    What am I doing wrong here?

							    -Bart.

Your define-character-style-families stuff is correct except that you
need a DIFFERENT font for the printer, something like fonts:lgp-skti.
Of course, you also have to create THAT font!

It should have all size parameters increased by a factor of 4 (roughly).  
[Laser printers are typically 300dpi, whereas the screen is something
like 80dpi]
And of course, you get to redraw all the characters at the higher
resolution!  You could start by magnifying your old characters.
You've still got a LOT of manual touching up to do, though.

(let ((*philosophy* t))

With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been better to start by
drawing the high res characters for the lgp, then shrinking them to get
the tv fonts -- less touching up would be necessary.

It would be nice if there were some more general tools to aid in this
sort of thing.  There are (or were) some pieces laying around in FED:
that could be used to assemble some utilities that would automatically
convert an lgp to tv font (which would still need touchup), but I dont think 
there's anything that high level already in there.  

-- This kind of thing comes up too infrequently to be worth much of
Symbolics time; witness FED itself being set aside.
As it is, the various inconsistencies between tv & lgp fonts is
sometimes irritating, but, again, I'd rather Symbolics focus on other
things.
What's really needed, I think, is something like a metafont using a much
higher level description from which to create bitmaps at various
resolutions.

And frankly, creating fonts isn't something to be taken too casually,
anyway.  Creating fonts is great fun, yes. But creating good
fonts that are pleasing to the eye, consistent and readable is an ART!
When using a bitmap editor, very often what is `correct' in the large
font editing window looks awful at its normal size, and conversely, what
looks wrong in the large looks exactly right in use.

bruce
miller@cam.nist.gov