Re: lout and ghostscript

[Franck Arnaud]

In message <address@hidden> Mike Dowling writes:

> When I view the output from lout using ghostview, a well known front end to
> ghostscript, the spacing is all screwed up.  Words appear run together as
> though they were a single word, yet printing on a laser, postscript printer
> always produces beautiful results.

You're probably using the wrong font. Lout determines the spacing using the 
afm (font metrics) files for the standard postscript fonts. There's no 
magic, you must use with ghostscript the font that is described in Lout's  
font directory. If you do not have it, it will use another font than the 
one described, and of course the display may be or will be messed up.

Solutions:

1) Use the standard postscript fonts (Courier,Times,Helvetica) in standard 
weights (roman,italic,bold,bolditalic) and install the 12 standard postscript 
fonts in ghostscript. You can find them, for example, in some versions 
of Adobe Acrobat (DOS, earlier windows version) that you can find on the adobe 
ftp server and elsewhere. Modify ghostscript fontmap accordingly.

2) Select public domain fonts or buy fonts from a vendor. Postscript fonts 
come with two files: the font itself (.pfa or .pfb file) that you install in 
ghostscript (fontmap) and the metrics file (.afm) that you install with 
Lout (/font and fontdefs file to be modified accordingly). Then use the newly 
installed font(s) in your lout document as explained in the manual.

> Yet, with TeX, dvips
> converts to postscript, which is then sent to lpr which pushes it through the
> ghostscript filter to the printer, but with immaculate results!

TeX does not use postscript fonts usually. It uses its own font system, 
produces bitmaps, and send the bitmaps to the printer (even when outputing 
to postscript). It produces bigger postscript files, and is device-dependent 
(the tex font is rasterised by tex to the dpi of the device, while ps fonts 
are vector fonts).

--
Franck Arnaud <internet address@hidden> <cis 100041,375>