. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Next Month: Postscript and Hypertext extensions to TeX. - plus - Where to find the best -- and coolest -- fonts on the Internet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .