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Date:      09 Nov 1999 16:34:31 +0200
From:      Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
To:        freebsd-chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Student project ideas
Message-ID:  <86hfiv68eg.fsf@localhost.hell.gr>
In-Reply-To: "Gray, David W."'s message of "Tue, 9 Nov 1999 08:07:13 -0500"
References:  <01D4D419B1A4D111A30400805FE65B13033660AE@nmrusdunsx1.nielsenmedia.com>

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"Gray, David W." <David_W_Gray@tvratings.com> writes:

> Y'know, I'd like to see the output go to LaTeX. Why, you might well
> ask? In LaTeX, I can use a package called Vmargin to let me change the
> size & *shape* of a page. I like to print out pages 2up 2sided, which
> happens to neatly fit in the 'pc' sized binders you see all over the
> place. The typical way of doing this is to output postscript, and use
> postscript code to rotate, translate, and scale. This sucks. TeX fonts
> are *bitmaps* and don't scale. Also (more importantly to me), the
> aspect ratio (height to width) is notably different between an
> 8.5"x11" sheet (US letter) and the resulting 5.5"x8.5" half
> sheet. Also, the fonts that *do* scale (native PS), are half size, and
> I'm not getting any younger...

If you don't really mind rolling your own macros here, the reference
cards for some of the GNU programs, usually distributed with the source
of the program, can be good examples of two-column printing with TeX.

However, using plain TeX can be a pain, if one does not have the proper
macros and some experience with it.  Making the JadeTeX macros support
two-column printing (two-sided can easily handled by dvips AFAIK) seems
like a nice thing to do.  Then all that neat FreeBSD DocProj stuff can
be printed using the usual commands, and have that output style that you
like so much :)

As for the bitmap fonts of TeX, yes they don't scale nicely, but using
the PSNFSS font selection scheme, you can use Type-1 fonts on printed
output which imho give better results for hardcopies.  Knuth's work on
MetaFont is a thing to admire, but this does not make the default TeX
fonts prettier than, say, Adobe's ps-fonts.

-- 
Giorgos Keramidas, <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
"What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing." [Aristotle]


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