Document 59

Fonts in SW V. 2.5

Version: 2.5 - Scientific WorkPlace & Scientific Word

Q. Why is SW provided with so many fonts?

A. The fonts have different uses. For most on-screen display work, SW uses Windows Times Roman, Arial, Symbol and Typewriter fonts, along with cmsy10, cmcsc10, msam10, msbm10 and several other TrueType fonts.

The TrueTeX previewer provided with SW 2.5 requires many cmr fonts (5pt, 6pt, 7pt, 8pt, 9pt, 10pt, 12pt, 17pt) to provide the vast array of finely tuned mathematics characters required by TeX's very precise and complete typesetting.

The large number of fonts have to do with how the fonts look when they are scaled. You can see the difference when you look at the font sample in the Windows Control Panel Fonts program. Try comparing cmr17 with cmr5. Because the fonts are shown scaled to the same size, you can easily see that the cmr5 font is much wider and bolder and has a proportionally greater x-height than the cmr17 font. This difference is called optical scaling; it makes the font more readable at the design size. This is another example of the ways in which TeX is so much better than other typesetting systems–simply scaling a font linearly makes it look bad at sizes other than the design size.

Added 07/17/96

This document was created with Scientific WorkPlace.