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Imprint No 01
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I M P R I N T
The Newsletter of Digital Typography
Volume 1 Number 1
Contents copyright (c) 1997 by Robert A. Kiesling
and the contributors of IMPRINT.
All rights reserved.
To subscribe, submit articles, or comment, send email to:
imprint@macline.com
In this issue:
1. Welcome to IMPRINT: Our statement of purpose.
2. Adobe's PDF: In competition with another standard.
3. Blue Sky Research releases Type 1 Computer Modern Fonts into the
public domain.
4. TeX subject bibliographies online at the University of Utah.
5. Marginalize your documents with LaTeX.
6. Call for articles.
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Welcome to IMPRINT
IMPRINT is a free newsletter which covers digital typography systems.
That is, it covers both typesetting and imaging systems. It isn't too
much of a stretch to include document management systems in this
field. We would like IMPRINT to be a newsletter of real-world
applications, with the emphasis on how to produce quality output with
a minimum of fuss.
IMPRINT will be issued monthly for the present. That frequency may
change as demand, time constraints, or other needs dictate.
We would like this to be a forum for people (like myself) who handle
every phase of document preparation from conception to final output.
By now this kind of auteurism is common in the publishing world. But
now computer technology enables individuals to produce commercial-
quality output. There is still a niche in the Internet community
between peer-reviewed academic journals and the slick, pop magazines
which you can find on any newsstand in the United States and
elsewhere.
Specifically, that means we are interested in stories about TeX and
LaTeX, metafont, Postscript, troff(1) and friends, emacsen and vii,
BibTeX, rcs(1), and any other software that helps you in the
preparation of documents. The quality of this software is second to
none, and much of it is in daily use producing documents in business
and academia throughout the world.
Many of these are languages. At the least, they are software "tools,"
not "solutions," in the words of Brian Kernigan, one of the early Unix
system documenters. Much of the software which implements these
languages is, incidentally, public domain or shareware. We will
consider stories on Distiller, DocMaker, OpenDoc, or other authoring
systems. We'll even consider articles on HTML and Java, although
those are well-covered elsewhere. (Plus, I don't have a Web site to
test software and code on.)
Nor will we rule out articles which cover Photoshop, Framemaker, Quark
XPress, or the like. However, there are already a number of good
magazines and books which cover these programs. Further, the cost of
these systems, both hardware and software, can be prohibitive for
individual users.
However, we would like to avoid articles covering ClarisWorks,
MicroSoft Word, or any other word processor. We believe that IMPRINT
should have a strong bias towards people who publish their own
documents in one form or another.
IMPRINT is independent of any operating system or manufacturer.
Articles covering Windows software, MS-DOS, Mac OS, and Unix in any of
its variants, or any other operating system, are equally welcome.
That said, we will get underway. Your comments, constructive
criticism, and contributions are welcome. We will endeavor to make
this newsletter as timely, informative, and accurate as possible. We
would like IMPRINT to be a resource you can count on.
Sincerely,
Robert Kiesling
Editor, IMPRINT
imprint@macline.com
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Adobe and Acrobat:
In competition again with another standard.
If you haven't looked recently, there is a lot of message traffic on
the comp.text.pdf newsgroup. The PDF file format is the graphics
interchange format used by Adobe's Acrobat reader and related
software, which has been implemented for every major operating system,
including Linux. Development efforts seem to be quite active in the
PDF world. There is still a nagging debate, in the PDF community and
elsewhere, over the question: Does the world need another graphics
standard?
There are arguments both for and against PDF's survival. One could
view PDF's popularity as a ploy to fill Adobe's bank account now that
Postscript has become a de facto industry standard. With the advent
of software like ghostscript and True Type, no longer do users need to
license Postscript from Adobe in order to produce typeset quality
output. It doesn't take a M.B.A. to realize that Adobe and its
licensed developers can make money selling (commercial) software that
will produce, distribute, and manipulate PDF images.
On the other hand, there seems to be considerable development of
software that will edit PDF files directly. This could make the PDF
file format unique. PDF files are claimed by their developers to be
editable at the object level. What this means is that a PDF editor
can transparently manipulate a graphic, paragraph of text, or an
entire page with alacrity. PDF editors for the present are vaporware.
But there are many popular programs that will output the PDF format.
Ghostscript will write PDF files. So will MS Word and Framemaker.
This process/compose/preview cycle is similar to the way TeX documents
are written, and also Postscript documents, insofar as they are
hand-written at all.
The debate has taken place mainly in the Postscript high-end word
processing camp, which seems to have adopted PDF as sort of a compiled
form of Postscript, and in the TeX world, where PDF has been viewed
with detachment. There is TeX software that will output PDF directly
from TeX input, but these programs are still in development. It is
easy enough anyway to convert a DVI file to Postscript with dvips and
then to PDF with ps2pdf.
TeX and LaTeX developers can't claim object-level graphics editing,
either. The only WYSIWYG editor of standard TeX is the LyX word
processor. LyX displays LaTeX output reasonably accurately on the
screen while you edit. It's an interactive LaTeX interpreter,
basically. One could think of editing LaTeX markup labels as
object-level editing, but it isn't quite as developed as object-level
editing the way Framemaker or Quark Xpress edit their own proprietary
formats. I haven't used LyX enough to customize its standard LaTeX
formats, but it would require an effort on the order of customizing
LaTeX input files. Also, LyX is mind-numbingly slow, even on an Intel
486 machine. Further, I have only seen it available for Unix family
operating systems.
If a similar utility exists for WYSIWYG editing of raw Postscript
files, I have yet to see it.
Direct editing of DVI files has certainly been thought of. But this
seems to be impractical. It skirts TeX and LaTeX's primary
implementation as languages. The DVI file format may also be too
machine-dependent for a standard to evolve. There has certainly been
work done in this area, though, and it might be worth looking into in
a future article.
So, for the present, it seems that PDF has enough unique features to
justify its existence. But it is important to remember that PDF is a
proprietary graphics file format. It is neither a page description
language nor a document markup language. One must spend a few hundred
dollars on Distiller and related software before developing PDF
documents. All one gets for that money is a proprietary output file
format. PDF in this respect has little advantage over standard
Postscript or the TeX DVI standard. For all the talk, PDF editors are
still vaporware. Whether the PDF file format will survive and evolve
must await the judgment of the marketplace, which is what Adobe has
aimed its PDF product line at.
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Blue Sky Research releases Type 1 Computer Modern Fonts
into the public domain.
Blue Sky Research has announced the release, into the public domain,
of a complete set of the typefaces of Computer Modern in the form of
75 PostScript text and symbol fonts. Computer Modern includes a broad
variety of roman, italic, and sans-serif text faces, as well as an
extensive collection of mathematical and scientific symbols. Computer
Modern is widely used in scientific and technical publishing, as it is
the customary font family of the TeX programmable typesetting system.
The Computer Modern faces were designed by Prof. Donald Knuth of
Stanford University, "based to a considerable extent on the
letterforms of Monotype Modern 8A," for the publication of his seven
volume series, The Art of Computer Programming. The faces were
originally expressed as computer programs in Knuth's METAFONT type
design system; a complete description can be found in Computer Modern
Typefaces, the fifth volume of Knuth's Computers and Typesetting
series, published by Addison-Wesley in 1986. The PostScript form of
the fonts was produced in 1988 by Blue Sky Research, of Portland
Oregon, and Y&Y, Inc., of Concord Massachusetts, who have published
the fonts in conjunction with their commercial implementations of
Knuth's TeX program.
The character outlines were derived from high-resolution METAFONT
-generated character bitmaps by the ScanLab application from
Projective Solutions (Ian Morrison and Henry Pinkham), applied and
corrected by Douglas Henderson of Blue Sky Research; character hints
were created by software from Y&Y (Berthold and Blenda Horn), with
extensive hand work by Blenda Horn; font engineering, production, and
packaging were by Douglas Henderson and Berthold Horn.
Grants by the American Mathematical Society and a consortium of
scientific societies have contributed to making this public release
possible. The American Mathematical Society has agreed to coordinate
the public availability of the fonts. They are available in the CTAN
archives and their mirror sites, in the directory:
fonts/cm/ps-type1/bluesky
The fonts are archived in the files:
cmps-macintosh.hqx (for Macintosh)
cmps-pc.zip (for MS-DOS)
cmps-unix.tar.gz (for Unix)
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TeX subject bibliographies online at the University of Utah.
Prof. Nelson Beebe of DVIWare fame sent me a message in response to
the announcement of IMPRINT that I mailed a couple weeks ago. The
University of Utah's online computer bibliography database, he says,
now has over 138,000 entries, including named bibliographies sgml,
texbook2, texbook3, texgraph, unicode, typeset, type, font, epodd,
eleccomp, and ep.
The collection, Beebe writes, "is supported by over 100K lines of
software that I've developed for bibliography work. The collection
is mirrored nightly to many archive sites around the world, including
the huge Computer Science archive in Karlsruhe, Germany; about 30M to 100M
per night is transferred from our archive."
You can visit the bibliography archives at the following URLS:
ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/index.html#{sgml,texbook2....}
Of particular interest for digital typesetting are:
http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/digital-libraries.html
http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/fonts/index.html
The latter URL contains information about the PostScript font
offerings of Adobe, Bitstream, and Monotype, plus information about
which PostScript fonts are supplied by UNIX vendors, where they are
found, and naming conventions, Professor Beebe says.
It should also be noted that the University of Utah archives house the
definitive library of TeX DVIWare code, originated by Professor Beebe
himself. Its URL is:
ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/dvi
It's been years since I've logged into the Utah archive looking for
DVI output software. As soon as I have some on-line time available, I
plan to make a personal stop at the archive, if not sooner, when
readers mail me with the most technically challenging concepts they
can conceive of.
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Marginalize your documents with LaTeX.
This is one of those things I wish I had known of in graduate school.
A group of us would sit around a conference table every Wednesday
night, marking up each others' manuscripts. It got to the point that
I could tell what every person around the table would write on my
manuscripts. Unfortunately, my marginalia didn't seem to impress
them. Perhaps it was the handwriting. If I had made the marginalia
as neat as the manuscripts themselves, my former colleages might have
been more impressed.
LaTeX provides a facility to put text in the margins with its
\marginpar declaration. Simply include
\marginpar{Some text.}
in your document, and LaTeX will set "Some text." in the right-hand
margin. In my own work I make the margin text stand out from the
body, which in my manuscripts is 12-point, doublespaced Courier. I
declared a macro, \marginnote , that makes the type style of the notes
as different from the body text as possible:
\def\mymarginote#1{\marginpar{\raggedright
\singlespace %this depends on setspace.sty
\em #1}}
This will provide single-spaced, italic text in the right-hand margin.
It requires the following declaration in the document preamble:
\usepackage{setspace}
But I use the setspace.sty package anyway, because I commonly produce
double-spaced typescripts.
Even better, I found, is sort of an electronic "scribbling" in the
margins with the text running sideways. I have defined a macro,
\marginalia , which is:
\def\marginalia#1{\marginpar{\rotatebox{90}
{\parbox[b]{2.5in}{%
\sffamily
\footnotesize
\singlespace{\em #1}}}}}
and gives me text which is rotated 90 degrees in the margin. The
2.5-inch width of the \parbox is arbitrary. It is a convenient width
for the margin notes that I usually write. You must have a Postscript
printer to print these, however, or have filtered your output through
ghostscript. In any event, you will need to declare,
\usepackage{graphics}
in the preamble of your document. The \parbox text is like a \special
once it is rotated. It needs to be imaged by the Postscript routines
in the graphics.sty package and the output devices.
If you have tips like these, or techniques which you have developed to
make your life easier, please send them to us, and we will be happy to
include them.
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Call for Articles
IMPRINT would like to hear from you. Do you have a real world
application that you have applied digital typography to, or have you
solved a problem using digital typography technology? What we're
looking for is articles on typesetting using TeX and LaTeX, page
makeup which even includes Framemaker and Quark, and document design.
If you have any hints for designing documents or fonts, we're
interested in these subjects, too. Remember, nothing happens in a
vacuum. Please send e-mail with your stories, or your ideas for
stories, or events that you think we should know about, to:
imprint@macline.com
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Next Month:
Postscript and Hypertext extensions to TeX.
- plus -
Where to find the best -- and coolest -- fonts
on the Internet.
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IMPRINT is copyright (c) 1997 by Robert A. Kiesling and its
individual contributors. IMPRINT may not be reproduced in any
way without the express consent of its contributors. Individual
stories are copyrighted by their respective authors, and the
copyright of each story reverts to the author after inclusion
in IMPRINT.
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