[12440] in Athena Bugs
Re: decmips 7.7F: xdvi
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (cfields@MIT.EDU)
Fri Aug 19 17:47:21 1994
From: cfields@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 17:46:48 +0500
To: jh@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
Cc: yandros@MIT.EDU, kcunning@MIT.EDU, cfyi@MIT.EDU
Hi! You recently reported random problems with xdvi and fonts...
> What were you trying to do?
> Use xdvi to display a DVI file, and read it.
>
> What's wrong:
> The letters are too thin to be read easily. The quality is
> definitely much poorer than the previous release's xdvi.
This is definitely a matter of opinion. I found the quality to be far
better in this release.
> The Athena release 7.7 xdvi (decmips and rsaix, possibly others) has
> two bugs:
>
> 1. the default density (-S) is documented as 20%, but really is 40%.
> This makes the letters come out too thin to be read easily.
Not true. It is in fact 20%.
> 2. the -S option (and the corresponding X resource) don't work to
> change the density setting, forcing you to use the 40% density.
The -S option applies only to the scaling of bitmaps when
anti-aliasing is not used. By default however, anti-aliasing is used,
and therefore the -S option is irrelevant. To turn off anti-aliasing,
use the -nogrey option.
> Since the release 7.7 fonts omit everything below 600dpi, you can't go
> back to using 300dpi/40% with the files in this release.
I really don't think you would want to. Anti-aliasing is the best
thing since sliced bread.
> This renders the 7.7 xdvi useless for displaying readable text.
Not so. From the manual page:
-gamma gamma
(.gamma) Controls the interpolation of colors in the
greyscale anti-aliasing color palette. Default value
is 1.0. For 0 < gamma < 1, the fonts will be lighter
(more like the background), and for gamma > 1, the
fonts will be darker (more like the foreground). Nega-
tive values behave the same way, but use a slightly
different algorithm.
While I'm happy with the default gamma value for black text on a white
background (with my eyes, on my monitor :), it is clearly a matter of
taste. Perhaps those are not your default colors; with my default
colors, I specify a gamma of -2.5. I would suggest you try a value of
1.5 as a start, if you are actually using black on white.
This perhaps could use some treatment in the User Release Notes and
consulting could be better informed about it.
> Also, the loss of fonts below 600 dpi is annoying if you have a 300 or
> 400dpi printer, as many ILG's, departmental clusters, and people on
> resnet do.
Is it? What is the effect of this loss? Last year on the initial try
of getting the 600dpi font support into the release, I had no problems
with printing with the new fonts on a 300dpi printer.
Craig
