When TEX and Metafont Work Together
Contents
1. Suppose the result of a Metafont calculation is 6 18 pt Then the Metafont statement ligtable 0 1 kern 6 18pt don t forget the sharp symbol records this value in the t fm file for this dummy font as the kern between char0O and char1 Here s how TEX can retrieve this value font foo dummy newdimen result setbox0 hbox foo char0 char1 result wd0 setbox0 hbox foo char0 char1 advance result by wd0 Now result holds the value 6 18 pt In prac tice additional hackery can strip the pt away leaving a pure numeric value By the way TEX boxes can have negative widths so it is possible to store negative quantities this way MF ligtable 0 1 kern 6 18pt TEX font foo dummy newdimen result setbox0 hbox foo char0 char1 result wd0 setbox0 hbox foo char0 char1 advance result by wd0 Figure 2 Metafont talks to TEX In the old Metafont we were restricted to 256 kern pairs per font and it s easy to use these up in this kind of scheme In the new Metafont each font may have up to 32k kern pairs It is hardly likely that we will run out now so I recommend that you upgrade your TEX and Metafont if you haven t done so already 4 Labelling Figures What would labelling a figure involve At the time Metafont creates the figure it should take note of the Dutch TEX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands When TEX and Metafont Work Toge2. there was no room for labels in this case Figure 8 Special effects with Metafont Figure 8 shows one way that Metafont can draw a three dimensional bowl If it doesn t look sufficiently 3 D blame the author and not Metafont It s fun generating shading but you quickly run up against the memory capacity of normal Metafont as I did in figure 7 If the user community vocalizes a need for this kind of Metafont work I hope the implementer community will respond with versions of Really Big Metafont Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Bijlage V 4 1 Digression Applying Shading to Regions in Metafont I d like to briefly digress to indicate the method I used to shade Metafont regions The crucial idea behind this was suggested to me by Yannis Haralambous Suppose we want to apply a striped vertical pattern to a simple rectangle as schematically illustrated in fig ure 9 It s helpful to remember that regions created by fe fe H pu H ph Pi e e Be pS picture PrRMOMNM NF F amp F bh fe fe pO e N N NO NH FP FP e e e e e e N BONDI NYO FP e x d adding When TEX and Metafont Work Together 127 Metafont are patterns of pixels In this figure the ab sence of a pixel is indicated by a period and the presence of a single pixel by a 1 Metafont though can doubly triply or multiply write on a pixel so that pixel values may possess other whole number values P
3. Z AA 2 A e S Dy gS 5 oY 2 N c4 5 Ra Lf gt TS nN ogo YOO 3 i FATISWMAHL JSNWy OL KINO Figure 25 Typesetting along a golden ellipse Metafont rotates the type by modifying an underlying transformation called currenttransform which is a hook that Knuth provided for the purpose of doing last minute things to letters It is helpful of thinking of a transformation as something that changes the shape position or orientation of a curve in certain allowable ways You won t be surprised to learn that we can shift a curve up or down in position and that we can rotate it but we may also do a few other things such as e uniformly magnify a curve e magnify a curve in the x or y directions separately e skew a figure and e perform any number of these all at once Transformations uniformly magnify a curve magnify a curve in the z or y directions separately skew a figure and perform any number of these all at once Figure 26 Legal transformations in Metafont As long as we are rotating letters perhaps we can ap ply other of these transformations to the letters of our text For example in figure 27 we have requested that Metafont shrink each letter at the same time it applies the rotation Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands In the next figure figure 28 you see what happens when we apply a transformation that does not include a rotat
4. a non convex path and so we must address and deal with the issue of non convex typesetting to successfully typeset the seal The centering is relatively easily done since we can pretend to set the type at 9 00 and measure the angle of the ray connecting the final letter with the circle s origin Half this angle is the angular offset we use to recalibrate the rotation angles of the letters which we do before creating the characters We handle kern information by storing the kern inform ation in a third file in the initial measuring process In the second step Metafont reads this information in and uses it to modify the width information of the charac ters Of course the kern file is just an Ascii file and we can edit any of the values if some fine tuning of the kerns is needed Pan wt ae g Oa gt O Qe a i fe ha 2 Am sa S es ae 2 F Ka Lp gt A aO OF gpceuoS When TEX and Metafont Work Together 137 Figure 32 Where to put neighboring letters on in scribed text Finally we handle the typesetting of the bottom por tion of the text of the seal as another application of Metafont s handy solve macro Progress along any Metafont path can be measured using a so called time parameter In any pair of characters we imagine drawing a line along the right edge of the left member of the pair and another along the left edge of the right character solve can find the proper value of to
5. he has no plans himself to do this A final approach to the problem of combining text with figures is a simple one write your own implementa tion of a Metafont like language to do this That s the approach John Hobby took with his MetaPost system When TEX and Metafont Work Together 131 The macro packages I just mentioned appear to be freely available for use and can be downloaded from many good archives I obtained diagramf from the niord server anonymous ftp from niord shsu edu in directory diagramf and the other two from the Aston archives anonymous ftp from tex ac uk mfpic is also available from niord 5 TEX to Metafont It s much easier to get TEX to talk to Metafont TEX has many more file handling commands at its disposal and it s perfectly possible to get TEX to create a file whose contents conform to proper Metafont syntax Later Metafont can read the file What purpose is served by having T X talk to Meta font in this fashion TEX can record metric information about sequences of letters it will typeset Then Meta font can use this information to create a character based upon the positions measurements states of characters which came before NOOK Figure 17 Why we need a convex path As a first application suppose we want to typeset along a convex path Informally speaking a convex path is one which sheds water More precisely if we start driving along it from the left to the right we n
6. points of the streams which are _ farms with every indica p the vales and event to the the even and graceful bottoms of the hills Academies and minor edifices of learning meet the eye of the stranger at every few miles as he winds his way through this uneven territory and places for the worship of God abound with that frequency which flows from unfettered liberty of conscience From The Pioneers of James Fenimore Cooper Figure 35 Embedding the State of New York The first about which I will say very little is an applic ation of data display using TEX I hope to talk about it at a conference like this in a year or two The second was suggested to me in conversation with Yannis Haralambous I might like to embed some ir regularly shaped object within text as in figures 34 and 35 I pass to Metafont the coordinates of the outline of the object Metafont can measure the points at which horizontal baselines intersect the path and obligingly pass that information back to TEX TEX can use that information in a parshape command to create the properly shaped paragraph Yannis and I have begun talking about yet a third applic ation of these principles and that is toward typesetting Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 in Korean The bad news is that there are over 2000 letters in the Korean alphabet far too many for any single font The good news is that these letters actually syllables are comp
7. use when placing the right hand character so the two lines intersect at the tops of the types aS oN s RA lt 4 ow S CZECH Figure 33 A possible letterhead logo Figure 33 shows an example of this logo typesetting which might be appropriate for a conference Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 138 When TEX and Metafont Work Together Bijlage V Generation of letterforms by mathematical means was first tried in the ee ae it ee came popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and it was abandoned for good reasons during the eighteenth century Perhaps the twenz for this idea to make a comeback now that are able to do the calculations Moder in which metal type has been replaced and ones that specify the desired positio and computer science increasingly relevant t completely precise definition of letter shapes jeth century will turn out to be the right time athematics has advanced and computers rinting equipment based on raster lines y purely combinatorial patterns of zeroes ink in a discrete way makes mathematics rinting We now have the ability to give a will produce essentially equivalent results on all raster hased machines Moreover the shapes can be defined in terms RNE rhinkabie making it possible for designers to perform valuable experiments that were previously unthinkable This is drawn f
8. 124 When TEX and Metafont Work Together Bijlage V When TFX and Metafont Work Together Alan Hoenig Department of Mathematics John Jay College Mail 17 Bay Avenue Huntington NY 11743 USA 516 385 0736 ajhjj cunyvm Abstract When TEX and Metafont communicate to each other they can do more together than they can alone This presentation concentrates on two illustrations of this principal and urges readers to come up with more When TEX becomes sensitive to information passed to it from Metafont it is possible to prepare diagrams and figures using Metafont and then to have TEX prepare labels which can be precisely positioned within the figure When communication goes the other way TEX and Metafont can prepare special purpose fonts which among other things can be set along curved baselines Illustrations of both techniques are presented Keywords TEX Metafont labelling figures figures with labels curvilinear typesetting special effects type setting typesetting special effects 1 Introduction When we force TEX and METAFONT to talk to each other they can do different things and more interesting things than when they work in isolation and I will give two major examples of this For the sake of complete ness though I will try to cover these examples in depth even though I am more interested in the overview than the details Plus I plan to allow myself the luxury of several major digressions whenever I feel like i
9. 5 5 Examples In figure 23 you see some text typeset along a wiggly self intersecting curve Unfortunately it doesn t seem to be possible to have TEX automatically make space so it doesn t overprint at the point of intersection Figure 23 Type along a wiggly curve bead ny a Looe 2 4 3 pe gt a va 2 S a a FRETA 00KS AN F MATICO C Fg NCS 1 py a gt 979 Sa y FS eo ey o z Da Fong sax aa eo SE nm nec D ig VY Of a z ge T ROD gt eg wr 1 TOUd SY sa TaLans Figure 24 Type along a spiral In figure 24 TEX typesets along a spiral It is harder than you think to draw a spiral in Metafont so it is nice to be able to print the curved type twice with and without the underlying path so we can convince ourselves that TEX and Metafont have remained true to the curve For some reason certain device drivers Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 choked when trying to print this bit of text Figure 25 was inspired by a promotional piece de veloped by Blue Sky Research purveyors of TEXtures for the Macintosh The radii of the ellipse are in golden ratio 1v5 a particularly pleasing ratio It proved to be straightforward to achieve the font change Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Bijlage V When TEX and Metafont Work Together 135 T LIFE MUST APPLY wins SHOR HIMSE p To anne OR Pan 7 x Vr cae Ys x Ye A e oy os L Cx
10. ata Ina Unix en vironment grep does this straightforwardly but even on other platforms it s simple enough to create a utility to do that for you Dutch TEX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Bijlage V When TEX and Metafont Work Together 129 Figure 11 Computer Modern Candy Stripe Although this dependence on grep is outside the TEX Metafont loop its advantage is that you can pass more than numeric data to TEX In the method I outlined pre viously it was our job to keep straight which label text belongs to which label position With diagramf you combine the text with the position data in the Metafont file so no further record keeping is necessary Using Diagramf 1 MF create figure 2 grep strip log file 3 TEX run file to measure label text 4 Return to beginning to resolve forward references Figure 12 The steps in using diagramf There is a further advantage to this method After TEX typesets the label text it can pass metric information back to Metafont As a result Metafont can revise the diagram to conform to the text Figure 13 shows one result of this in practice Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands There are three other packages users should be aware of Both allow the placement of text at positions inside previously prepared PostScript figures These diagrams can be produced by other applications like Adobe Illu
11. ent areas For example Metafont is quite good at arith metic while TEX is not TEX on the other hand is decent at reading and writing files while Metafont is seriously deficient in that area The idea behind having TEX and Metafont work to gether is to have each do the things each is good at and communicate these results to the other The best way to transfer information from TEX to Meta font is to ask TEX to write this information to a file us ing statements like figure 1 TEX is good at this and we can do this so the information in the file conforms to standard Metafont syntax Then Metafont simply An earlier version has appeared in Euro TEX 92 conference proceedings 1 Figures containing bits of text delimited by horizontal rules correspond to the slides that accompanied the oral presentation of this paper Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Bijlage V needs to input this file to have access to the data Fortunately Metafont does possess the ability to read text files newwrite out file mf write out zl w h Text for Meta font Figure 1 TX talks to Metafont Going the other way from Metafont to TEX is some what problematical One way I have used is to have Metafont create a dummy font and encode numerical information as the numeric value of a kern between char0 say and charl Let s make this more precise
12. ever turn our steering wheel to the left See figure 16 Figure 17 provides insight as to why we need a convex path We imagine that the type sits on chords connect Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands ing to points of the curve If the curve is convex then the problem of placing adjacent types is a problem of the geometry of the curve We simply butt the adja cent types at their bases as in the left of figure 17 The rectangles in this figure represent the bounding boxes of each character If the curve is not convex the problem of placing adjacent type requires us to make sure that Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 132 the types are far enough apart so they intersect only at their tops How far apart shall they be This is a much more difficult problem in general although I shall say something about a special case below 5 1 A Three Pass Method A three pass method is necessary to create the special purpose font for curvilinear typesetting Note that the end product is a special purpose font limited for one use only the typesetting of one particular message around one particular path This is quite different from the normal way we use Metafont Normally of course a Metafont font is appropriate for an infinite number of messages Fortunately the processes involved TRX and Metafont do their jobs so swiftly that the making of special purpose fonts is not at all onerous Measu
13. f this file and adjust the re maining files to call this file rather than the standard romanu mf file Fiddling with the macros Measure special position Measure angle of rotation Pass the offset information to TEX Figure 20 Making the special letters Here are some other things we need do in the make step of the cycle I use Metafont to draw the path along which the typesetting will go and this path becomes the first character in our new font charo Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Bijlage V Now for each character in the message Metafont de termines the position of this letter on the path and re cords this information for subsequent retrieval by TEX First suppose the point zg marks our current position on the curve Then we use Metafont s solve macro to find the point z such that the length of the chord z1 zo is the same as the width of the current character Plain Metafont sets the value of solve s tolerance to 0 1 we need to decrease to tolerance 0 001 or even smaller It s easy for Metafont to determine the angle of the chord and thus the angle of rotation for the letter As you see we are approximating the path by a series of chords which inscribe the path such that each face of the polygonal approximate path will be the exact width of each character in the message TEX will eventually need two pieces of information about each letter in order t
14. ges to the standard font files Actually such a strong assumption is not necessary It is sufficient to have Metafont descriptions of the fonts and with the appearance of utilities to convert outline font descriptions to Metafont descriptions this is not a burden at all The most important involves the actual program files Typically these have names like romanu mf con taining the programs for Roman uppercase letters or punct mf with the programs for punctuation In romanu the program structure is something like cmchar The letter A beginchar A endchar where the ellipses indicate the presence of material that is irrelevant to this discussion We want to embed these definitions into Metafont macros After all there may be more than one A ina curved text and we need to be able to create as many A s as necessary A series of te dious but trivial modifications transform the programs into subroutines The idea is to relate a letter n witha subroutine n_ which is a function of one argument the angle of rotation that is necessary to rotate the letter and keep it on the curved baseline The code fragment above might become Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 def A_ expr n rotation_angle currenttransform identity rotated rotation_angle def t_ transformed currenttransform enddef emchar The letter A beginchar n endchar enddef and so on for the remaining character programs We have to change the name o
15. ion Each letter has been skewed up or down so it conforms to the profile of the sunrise curve Actually the base of each letter is straight and coincides with an inscribed chord of the curve Transformations which apply curvature like that are generally not allowed in Metafont As long as the individual characters are so much smaller than the dimensions of the curve viewers don t seem to mind this innocent deception 5 6 Non Linear Transformations in Metafont It may be that Metafont is capable of making some limited non linear transformations after all Pd like to digress yet again to discuss this possibility Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 136 When TEX and Metafont Work Together y No 3 D Pr or Figure 27 A new representation for 7 A Metafont transformation is a collection of six con stants which Metafont uses in specified ways to make the transformation In figure 30 which I ll show presently I needed to specify a transformation whose six constants were not constant but depended instead on the horizontal distance For any given column of pixels that meant that the transform was constant for all the pixels in that column but would change a bit when we proceeded to the next column RISE OF MET Figure 28 Along a Metafont sunrise I stored the original untransformed object as a Meta font picture and I made the transformations on a pixel by pixel level The transformed image is stored in yet a
16. ixels may also be multiply erased and possess negative whole number values as well These observations are crucial in what follows 1 1 1 ko g 1 1 T ea oo a b fe Fe FY PY PAR FA pO 1 pattern e e e e e eree rR culling Figure 9 Applying a pattern to a region in Metafont Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 128 When TEX and Metafont Work Together lt a 5 we Bijlage V Figure 10 A region and some background patterns What happens when we add the pattern to the region To add two pictures together simply add the corres ponding pixel values Consequently figure 9 shows the new picture We see that some pixels now have values of 2 and it is precisely these pixels that we wish to pre serve in the final picture as these pixels trace out the striped pattern only in the region of the original shape in this case a rectangle But now our work is done for we can instruct Metafont to strip away all pixels except those with a value of two Once this culling is done we are left with the striped rectangle that we were after as shown finally in figure 9 A similar set of operations allows us to outline any re gion but as this is treated in The Metafontbook I will say no more about it here There is nothing special about stripes and rectangles this reasoning applies to arbitrary shapes and arbitrary patterns I ca
17. ke file In the absence of such a file make defines defaults for all such special purpose things make T MF spcmr12 sproman gt spromanu spromand The in this figure represents the file you need to prepare and which will contain the special definitions pertaining to your path As a practical matter all fonts are named spcmr12 in this scheme As with any meta font you have to con vert the generic pixel files into packed pixel pk files and place it and the corresponding font metric file in the places in your system where TEX expects to find them I have gotten into the habit of transferring these files into these distant directories with new names indicative of whatever they illustrate Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands font rofont spiral curvetype ABCDEFG message text for curved Figure 22 Mounting placing the curved type on the page 5 4 Step Three Mounting the Message Finally it s TEX s turn again The file mount tex contains all the positioning macros as well as the ma Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 134 chinery for extracting the position information from the kerns All you have to do is tell TEX the name of the special purpose font containing your message for example font rofont spiral When TEX and Metafont Work Together Bijlage V
18. n t resist showing off some patterns In figure 10 we see a general amorphous shape on which I have drawn an outline and patterns using these oper ations Of course we can use letterforms of a font on which to superimpose these patterns and you see an ex ample of Computer Modern Candystripe in figure 11 which is based on cminch or cm half inch tobe precise Figure 14 shows some more fonts The author Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 of the Computer Modern fonts has provided so many hooks into the programs generating the fonts that very little modification of the existing Metafont programs was needed to generate these fonts 4 2 Other Work with Labelled Figures Returning now to my main discussion I d like to com plete the discussion by referring to other work done in the field of labelling figures First is the diagramf package developed by Alan Jeffrey He uses a variant method which is superior in many respects to the one I have just outlined Metafont is able to produce only three kinds of files gf pixel files t fm font metric files and the ubiquitous log files I used the t m to communicate with TEX but he uses the log file in the following manner The Metafont message command displays its argument on screen but also records it in the log file If we cre ate a macro that automatically appends a flag to any message then a simple filter can process the log file collecting all this special message d
19. nother picture variable 1 Update transformation for new column 2 Pixel by pixel find out where ink starts and stops 3 Find the transforms for start and stop values 4 Continue on that column 5 Next column Figure 29 Performing non linear transformations Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 Bijlage V 1 Prepare for examining a new column by updating the transformation for that column 2 Start examining the column from the bottom up Look for the first pixel in that column that is black Keep examining pixels until the pixels are clear At this point we have a pair of numbers the first of which records the point at which the pixels are turned on and the second the point at which they are turned off 3 Find the transforms of those values In the image picture turn on the pixels for that column between these two values 4 Continue analyzing that column 5 Continue on to the next columns GUN RISE SUNGRT Figure 30 Nonlinear Metafont transformations Figure 30 shows the result of one non linear transform ation Metafont is not happy at working at the pixel level it takes about five minutes to generate these im ages on a 386 PC Normally Metafont could create comparable text in a matter of seconds If you look carefully you ll see that the boundaries of the transformed letters are more jagged than you ex pect This is work in progress and I hope that this embarrassing state
20. o pack age by Thomas Leatherum It s not a terribly extensive package the user manual TEXs out to four pages of magstephalf text but its product cycle is the in verse to that of Labtex and diagramf That is you start with TEX code and mfpic generates the appro priate Metafont files I am excited about mfpic for a simple reason Since all the mfpic commands are TEX commands this package is therefore a perfect in troduction to Metafont to those users who are too timid Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 to tackle Metafont itself Actually since the pictures are created with mfpic s TEX commands you fit the labels into the picture using usual kern commands rather than the special sleight of hand that I or Alan Jeffrey used Or so I gather from a very brief perusal of this package Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Bijlage V Labeling Packages e labtex ask the author e diagramf archives such as Aston tex ac uk and SHSU niord shsu edu e PSFrag Aston e PSBox Aston e mfpic SHSU Figure 15 Labeling packages and how to get them The author of mfpic makes no claim as to the com pleteness of his package It is modeled on the famous PiC TE X macros which attempt to the same thing but entirely within TEX Tom notes that mfpic is not com plete as not all of PiC TEX s capabilities are a part of mfpic He would like to see further enhancements made to mfpic but
21. o typeset it properly the z and y offsets of that letter from the previous letter We pass this information to TEX using kerning pairs as we did at the outset of this discussion to pass coordinate pairs to TEX in order to label a Metafont diagram When TEX and Metafont Work Together 133 Figure 21 Needed information The Metafont process uses so many more files than TEX does that it s worth examining the alterations to the nor mal Metafont production cycle in a slight more detail Normally to produce a font of cmr12 for example Metafont first reads a parameter file cmr12 mf which calls the driver file coman mf which finally calls the program files romanu mf romanl mf romand mf etc MF cmr12 roman mf gt romanu mf romand mf I mirror this process except I rename the files by adding the prefix sp for special purpose MF gt gt spcmr12 sproman mf spromanu mf spromand mf and add two new files to the process The first is make mf which contains the actual macros for ana lyzing and storing the curved baseline The driver file sproman calls this file A second file contains the actual definition of the path together with any special alterations to the macros to achieve whatever special effects you are after You call this file whatever you want but don t forget to input it in the ma
22. of affairs can be easily corrected 5 7 An Application for Curved Typesetting The only real application I can think of for curvilinear typesetting is for setting text around the circumference of a circular university or institutional seal Despite the simplicity of the path a mere circle compared to some of the non standard curves we have looked at there are a number of interesting problems that need to be solved in connection with this application 1 Need to center text 2 Need to alter kern values 3 Need to set bottom part along a concave path Figure 31 Problems for seals e The text needs to be centered with respect to the cir cumference That is it must be properly positioned along the seal e Unlike standard curvilinear typesetting we ex plicitly do need to include the kerns between char acters The text of the seal might not look right otherwise Furthermore we may need to be able to alter some of the kerns between characters because Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Bijlage V after all type may look different along a circle than along a straight line and we need a simple way to make this alteration e Text along a seal almost always comes in two parts The top part along the top of the seal is typeset along a convex path the circle itself But there is a bottom portion and this is set along the inside of a larger circle This text must be set along
23. osed from less than 30 separate components Each component represents a sound in the Korean language Each component can be coded as a Metafont macro We are optimistic that the source file can pass to Metafont the order in which the sounds make up the syllable Syllables appear to be built up from the phonemic components in straightfor ward ways Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Bijlage V When TEX and Metafont Work Together 139 We expect therefore that it will take somewhere on the E order of 200 special fonts to typeset a typical novel O 7 Conclusion I have discussed a couple of ways in which when TEX and Metafont work together the results are more than either could do singly That is the point to stress rather than the applications themselves I hope listeners will take this lesson to heart and develop their own T X Metafont applications ah Al a 3 Figure 36 Creating Korean type Then Metafont can create a special purpose font for the text There is room for 256 characters in a font which is roughly equivalent to a page of text in a typical book Dutch TeX Users Group NTG P O Box 394 1740 AJ Schagen The Netherlands Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993
24. p left TOP top right LEFT center point RIGHT Baseline left hsa neea A Baseline right bottom left BOTTOM bottom right Figure 6 Automatic tinkering with label placement Figure 6 show how these labels look using these automatic enhancements Both extradx and extrady have been set to 3pt By the way al though this particular figure could have been produced with T X after all it consists only of horizontal and vertical line segments which TEX can draw it was n t In particular observe that Metafont can also draw dotted and dashed lines Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 gt r Figure 7 Developing the theory of integrals One of my hidden agendas in this project is to remind people of the power and utility of Metafont as a figure and diagram generator With Metafont you can do all the things you expect in a figure and more now that it is possible to anchor labels in the diagram Less well known is Metafont s ability to add shading to a drawing Figure 7 displays a figure that was copied from the book I learned calculus from Published by Addison Wesley Knuth s publisher it seems to use Monotype Modern 8a the inspiration for Computer Modern as its text face There are two versions of this figure for a reason The larger version has labels but no shading standard Metafont cannot handle shading for such large pictures The smaller version was the largest I could generate with the shading but alas
25. re Make Mount Figure 18 Measure make mount When TEX and Metafont Work Together Bijlage V Three passes are needed to create the special purpose font First we measure the type with measure tex Then we make the type with macros contained in make mf plus others Finally we mount the letters on the page with mount tex Let s examine the steps one by one 5 2 Step One Measuring the Message TEX examines the text of your curved message in the first pass The macros in this file measure tex examines each individual character in your message but don t typeset it Using the techniques of ex ercise 11 5 page 67 of The TEXbook measure takes note of each character in the message and its width It prepares two files for later use by Metafont The file measure wid contains width information about the individual characters in the message while measure cha contains information about the letters and characters themselves Both these files are created using standard Metafont syntax Shortly Metafont will read these files character information file Exercise 11 5 gt Each character width information file Figure 19 Measuring the text 5 3 Step Two Making the Message One underlying assumption is that we are using the standard complement of Computer Modern fonts for curved typesetting In preparation for step two it is ne cessary to make a few chan
26. rom the preface to The Metafont book of Donald E Knuth Figure 34 Embedding an irregular figure in text 6 What Else There are three additional applications of TEX Metafont communication that I can think of Are there anv more I feel sure there are plenty Near the centre of the State of New York lies an extensive district of country whose surface is a succession of hills and dales or to speak with greater deference to geographical definitions of mountains and valleys It is among its rise and flowing from the limpid lakes and the numerous sources of the Susquehanna til uniting their streams they form one of States The mountains are generally arable not wanting where the sides greatly in giving to the coun character which it so em narrow rich and cul winding through each Beautiful and thriving vil the margins of the small lakes or situated at those favorable to manufacturing and neat and comfortable tion of wealth about them are scattered profusely through mountain tops Roads diverge in every direction from valleys to the most rugged and intricate passes of the these hills that the Delaware takes thousand springs of this regions meander through the valleys un the proudest rivers of the United to the tops although instances are are jutted with rocks that aid try that romantic and picturesque inently possesses The vales are tivated with a stream uniformly lages are found interspersed along
27. s trator MatLab Fontographer and so on Craig Barratt of Stanford has produced the PSF rag style for use with IATRX while Jean Orloff of CERN the PSBox style for use with either IAT X or plain TEX his long label Figure 13 Cutouts fit around their labels Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 130 When TEX and Metafont Work Together Bijlage V ems 7 pa 2 1 an eee aes es ere A o3 7 FAR i sm At i s i ws a n poy S es eee oan ant o roe gs Cini a n o amar Bi w mr wa aa ea e a a j st us m4 1 a Sy s m wt m a rE oe an X ya uua mi Ba al same nu N f anne nu w Tio our n m nm Wi ri n r m m m m arema acme wh a Li la TE oy on sh aa u ae m z va varir iri T is ee m x7 o ry v thal a oe a ans ie xm ome ik ub a iy wh 7 wh i M mn a wou me ah La m a om 7 re E aa ir at ay La m ya iw v p 8 ote EY ied E Py ga u 6m i a a de oe CE y rii im ri wal o ao dr EA F 7 1 no OAS m a Th 40 eg nin eae ge ae oO lt i ur ppan fom I conan a on we nal an me 3 e Rs Bs wee re wees A eeu eee tue ra mmr areara anra saran asanes cae a m n Corns woo pe lt a enans EET Ennan on a ven Sk sone a we 4 re Be a ee 1 Stee et D ver es ae perenne aa a ar Figure 14 More far fonts Figure 14 More fun fonts Just recently I became aware of another such package that I d like to mention This is the mfpic macr
28. t 2 Setting the Stage Labelled Diagrams Non standard Typesetting If you need graphics especially mathematical figures for a document I strongly recommend Metafont Para bolas and normal curves look like they are supposed to look and all elements of the picture are placed where they are supposed to be But there is a great problem Figures often need la bels or tags to be positioned precisely with respect to the figure and this Metafont does not give us I ve seen people insert graphics prepared by other programs in their TEX documents that come with text in some typeface completely different from the Computer Mod ern that s usually used in the main text This is an unac ceptable deviation from Knuth s vision in my opinion and my first example will be a discussion of ways to use TEX to label figures A second issue concerns the setting of type along non horizontal baselines I freely admit that this is not the kind of thing TEX was designed for nor is it the kind of thing that TEX users should normally care about un less they need to set type around a circular university or institutional seal Nevertheless it s fun that s def initely part of Knuth s vision and it fits right in with the context of this presentation It will also be possible to apply a variety of other special effects to the type for something a bit out of the ordinary 3 A Basic Idea TEX and Metafont have strengths in quite differ
29. ther 125 positions of each label Then it should pass that in formation to TREX Create the figure Identify the anchor points Store the coordinates of the labels Have TEX typeset the figures in the usual way font fig figfont oN fig char0 Figure 3 How to label figures using TEX and Metafont More precisely here s the sequence we must fol low 1 Create the figure with Metafont as a character in a special figure font 2 Identify the points in the figure which will be the anchors for the labels In Metafont we use notation z or z1 to refer to key points used for drawing we might use the notation lab or lab1 for these anchor points The tag lab refers to labels 3 Metafont will store the coordinates of the lab as kerns between char0 and successive characters of the figure font The components of each of the lab measures the horizontal and vertical offsets from the reference point origin of the figure 4 TEX typesets the figures in the usual way font fig figfont fig char0 A set of TEX macros allows placing the labels us ing the trick mentioned above One might say point This is a label andso on top right top left TOP LEFT center points IGHT Baseline lefil aseline right bottom left BOTTOM bottom right Figure 4 References for all pointing commands These macros are enclosed in two sets of macros the so called labte
30. x macros one for TEX and one for Metafont labtex tex imagines that each label is enclosed in a rectangular box Figure 4 shows the el even different pointing commands for positioning the label box with respect to the label point in the Metafont diagram Reprint MAPS 10 93 1 May 1993 126 When TEX and Metafont Work Together Bijlage V up3pt down right left extradx extrady everylabel tlpoint ltpoint tpoint rtpoint trpoint rpoint Brpoint rBpoint brpoint rbpoint bpoint blpoint lbpoint Blpoint lBpoint lpoint cpoint Figure 5 labtex pointing commands and tinker ing commands This figure also shows how tight the labels are in the absence of some tinkering We can tinker either by hand or semi automatically To adjust a label placement by hand we can use the commands up down right or left to move the label by a certain amount For example instead of saying cpoint A label we can say cpoint down3pt right2pt A label We can also adjust all labels automatically by means of three parameters which work in the back ground extradx and extrady place ex tra space to the right left or above below the label text A token everylabel akin to everypar everyhbox everymath and so on allows some global adjustments to the labels themselves For ex ample if you set everylabel ninepoint you would get smaller labels automatically to
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