RE: [Groff] My site ;-)

[Ted Harding]

On 22-Sep-00 Thomas Baruchel wrote:
> - soon comes a preprocessor for smallcaps following Adobe specification
> in the blue book (sorry, Ted, I like your way of solving the
> problem, but I am not completely happy with the idea of having
> thiner letters with my small caps).

Well, a comparison should be interesting ... !

I subsequently addressed the "thinness" problem by using a displaced
over-print, so the beginning of my smallcaps macro now looks like:

  .de smallcaps
  \c
  .nr .sc.ps (\\n[.s]*80/100)
  .nr .cap.PS \\n[.s]
  .nr .scsh (\\n[.ps]/100)
  .char a    \s[\\n[.sc.ps]]\Z'A'\h'\\n[.scsh]s'A\s[\\n[.cap.PS]]
  .char b    \s[\\n[.sc.ps]]\Z'B'\h'\\n[.scsh]s'B\s[\\n[.cap.PS]]
  .char c    \s[\\n[.sc.ps]]\Z'C'\h'\\n[.scsh]s'C\s[\\n[.cap.PS]]
    ........
  .char \(i. \s[\\n[.sc.ps]]\Z'I'\h'\\n[.scsh]s'I\s[\\n[.cap.PS]]
  ..

and /smallcaps is now

  .de /smallcaps
  \c
  .rchar a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z \(i.
  .char \(i. \(.i
  .rr .sc.ps
  .rr .cap.PS
  .rr .scsh 
  ..

(the \c now means you can invoke these in-line by \*[smallcaps] etc).

>   Adobe has a postscript way of building the smallcaps but... mere
> postscript code can't handle easely with kerning (I am a
> perfectionnist :-(
>   My preprocessor will be soon available with:
>   convert simple text into postscript and troff code to have pretty
> smallcaps with the right kerning.

Looking forward to seeing these. My solution above does not worry about
kerning, and the displaced overprinting is necessarily taking a chance
that you do not introduce tiny notches (the above seems to work fine
with Times).

I think the ideal solution is to build a new smallcaps font (using
transformations on the lines of the Blue Book smallcaps example, and with
the same structure of program as in say groff SS or ZDR definitions), but
of course you would have to do this for each different font you use.
The groff font file would then include the kerning data.

Best wishes,
Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
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Date: 23-Sep-00                                       Time: 00:04:55
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