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+\hyphenation{Micro-soft}
+\title{A tutorial on TrueType}
+\author[Ian D Chivers]{Ian D Chivers\\\texttt{udaa260@bay.cc.kcl.ac.uk}}
+\begin{Article}
+\section{Background}
+
+For a better understanding of what True Type has to offer it is useful
+to look a little closer at fonts and typography.
+
+\subsection{Type}
+
+It is important to realise that the design of fonts is part science,
+part art and part magic. When we look at the highest quality fonts we
+find they are designed to look good at a particular point size.
+A particularly good recent example is \emph{Telephone Book}, the font used
+in your BT telephone directories, and much credit must be given to
+John Miles of Banks and Miles for what has been achieved. The font
+is small, yet very legible when printed on relatively poor quality
+paper, and the directory is now 4 column rather than 3 column. This
+represents a considerable saving on trees!
+
+\subsection{Scalable fonts and digital type}
+
+Let us now look at scalable fonts and digital type.
+What the computer offers with the possibility of scalable
+fonts seems to go against accepted practice. The process is
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item take the font outline and scale to the correct size;
+\item fill the outline with pixels, \ie generate a raster bitmap;
+\item transfer to the display device
+\end{enumerate}
+
+There are two main problems here. Firstly a scaled font does not look
+good at all points sizes --- remember that fonts are designed to
+look good at specific points sizes. Secondly rasterisation has inherent
+problems that are particularly acute with low resolution devices where
+for example we have to map a character onto a small grid of dots or
+points. For more information on the general
+problems of rasterisation one should look at a book on
+computer graphics, and there is one given in the bibliography.
+
+The following illustrates one of the problems,
+
+{\footnotesize
+\begin{verbatim}
+ . . . . . . . . .
+ +-------+ +-------+
+ . . |. .| . . | . | . .
+ | | | |
+ . . |. .| . . | . | . .
+ | | | |
+ . . |. .| . . | . | . .
+ | +------------+ |
+ . . |. . . . . | . .
+ | |
+ . . |. . . . . | . .
+ | +------------+ |
+ . . |. .| . . | . | . .
+ | | | |
+ . . |. .| . . | . | . .
+ | | | |
+ . . |. .| . . | . | . .
+ +-------+ +-------+
+ . . . . . . . . .
+\end{verbatim}
+}
+
+\noindent where we are mapping an upper case h onto a low resolution
+device. The right hand upright is only one pixel wide, compared to
+two for the left. The human eye is surprisingly good at noticing
+things like this. To see this more realistically Paintbrush offers the
+possibility of zooming in on some text, and one can see the actual
+pixels and how the characters are made up. It is quite illuminating.
+
+Adobe were the first company to achieve widespread success with
+scalable fonts with \PS. They managed to do this by
+firstly adding special rasterisation algorithms to the
+interpreter to overcome the problems of small point sizes
+and low resolution devices, and secondly adding hints
+to type 1 fonts to further massage the characters to
+enhance their appearance.
+
+\section{True Type Fonts}
+
+One of the heavily marketed features of Windows 3.1 was the addition
+of True Type fonts to Windows. As someone who has been involved in
+electronic publishing for over ten years I had a high degree of
+scepticism about Windows and True Type.
+
+There are a number of advantages that True Type should bring and
+some of these are:
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item For all Windows applications the screen display should match the printer
+display, if the printer supports bit mapped mode, \PS\ or TrueType.
+
+\item The disappearance of jagged screen fonts, with no need to build
+each font at each point size that you wanted, as the fonts are scalable.
+This was the case with earlier versions of Windows, and one that will
+be familiar to most people involved in the dtp field, not just under Windows.
+
+\item In a university environment with staff and students using public access
+systems with Windows installed it means that they can take their document
+from one system to another and always have access to the following fonts
+\begin{quote}
+ Times New Roman\\
+ Arial\\
+ Courier New\\
+ Symbol\\
+ Wingdings\\
+\end{quote}
+and print them on a range of printers and get the same results, as the
+rasterisation takes place in the pc, rather than the printer.
+
+If Word for Windows is installed then the following additional fonts
+are also available
+\begin{quote}
+ American-Uncial-Normal\\
+ Fences\\
+ MT Extra\\
+ News Gothic\\
+\end{quote}
+\item The ability to send documents to bureaus without breaking the
+copyright on the font. With True Type you can embed a font in
+the document. The fonts are encrypted, but are easily decrypted
+for screen display and printing.
+\end{enumerate}
+
+Well, does it all work?
+In the main, yes. Though as with most things that Microsoft are
+involved with there are some minor problems.
+
+The statements below are based on a system based on a 33 MHz 80486 DX
+PC, with 8 Mb memory and a 1024 $\times$ 768 colour display.
+
+Firstly let us look at the rescaling of text as we alter the window
+size or actually alter the point size of the text.
+The on screen display is pretty good in most applications though
+I was surprised at the variation between them. Discussions with
+someone involved in Windows developments indicates that there is
+more than one way to achieve what should be the same end result.
+
+I had Adobe Type Manager installed and found little noticeable
+difference between them. ATM handles the \PS\ fonts, and
+Windows handles the TT fonts.
+
+There were differences in what packages running under Windows
+offered:
+
+\begin{quote}\footnotesize
+\begin{tabular}{lP{.3\textwidth}}
+Word For Windows 2.1& 4 to 127 points, 0.5 point increments\\
+Excel 4.0 & 1 to 409, 1 point intervals\\
+Write & 4 to 127, 1 point intervals\\
+Designer 3.1 & 1 to 144, 1 point increments\\
+Ventura 4.1.1 & 1 to 254 in 0.5 points \\
+Corel Draw & 0.7 to 2160.0, 0.1 point intervals\\
+\end{tabular}
+\end{quote}
+
+The sizes of the output files when printing surprised me initially.
+The following figures are for one A4 page that contains a table
+with each character in the Windows character set.
+
+
+\begin{quote}\footnotesize
+\begin{tabular}{P{.3\textwidth}r}
+Times Roman, \PS\ printer, using internal printer font & 173,958b\\
+TT Times New Roman, \PS\ printer, download bitmap,
+ 1270\,dpi & 5,648,944b\\
+TT Times New Roman, \PS\ printer,
+ download bitmap, 300\,dpi & 509,841b\\
+TT Times New Roman, Epson printer, download bitmap, 180$\times$360\,dpi & 599,905b\\
+\end{tabular}
+\end{quote}
+
+
+If we look at one of the graphing packages or spreadsheets then we would
+have figures similar to those below:
+\begin{quote}\footnotesize
+\begin{tabular}{P{.3\textwidth}r}
+\PS\ printer,
+ A4 page, 11 $\times$ 8 inch image area, 300 $\times$ 300\,dpi & 990000b\\
+Epson 360 $\times$ 180\,dpi,
+ A4 page, 11 $\times$ 8 inch image area, 360 $\times$ 180\,dpi & 712800b\\
+\end{tabular}
+\end{quote}
+For a 20 page document involving text and graphics therefore we could easily
+have a file size of 20 $\times$ 600000b, or about 11.5 Mb.
+
+Printing this kind of document is therefore slow on dot matrix printers, and
+not wonderfully fast on \PS\ printers.
+
+This obviously has some fairly important ramifications in a university
+environment where increasingly people are moving to Windows and Windows
+based applications. Good business for the printer manufacturers!
+
+TT works well with non-latin fonts, which did again surprise me.
+With Arabic, for example, there is a separate screen font for
+menus, dialog boxes etc, as the subtle angles in Arabic writing
+cannot be scaled cleanly at normal screen resolutions (72\,dpi --- ega
+or 96\,dpi --- vga). However, when printed it looks simplistic. The second
+Arabic font does look quite good printed and does a reasonable job
+of the cursive Arabic style.
+
+\section{So who will use TT?}
+
+For people with dot matrix printers, and early HP Laser Jets (and there are
+a lot about) they have for the first time access to a print quality normally
+associated with \PS\ devices.
+
+For people involved in document interchange the fact that you can legally
+move documents and the fonts around is a strong plus. How many people reading
+this article will have been given a \PS\ file to print and had
+problems with missing fonts?
+
+For people with access to local \PS\ facilities and typesetters
+at ULCC and Oxford then I can't easily see TT displacing \PS.
+
+An examination of the major players in the typesetting industry shows
+that \PS\ is the de facto industry standard. Xerox offer for
+example a complete publishing solution with their DocuTech aimed at
+the professional printer, and that is based on 600\,dpi scanners and \PS.
+
+\section{Further reading}
+For those with Internet access there are a number of sources of
+information on fonts and TT in particular. Microsoft make available a
+mass of material at \texttt{ftp.uu.net} in the
+\texttt{/vendor/microsoft/TrueType-Info} directory. Some of the files
+held with descriptions are:
+\begin{itemize}
+\item \texttt{ttspec1.zip}, \texttt{ttspec2.zip},
+ \texttt{ttspec3.zip}: The complete TT specification. About 400
+ pages if my memory serves correctly.
+\item \texttt{tt-talk.zip}: Contains three papers, one on digital
+ type, one on linear versus non linear scaling and the third on the
+ Lucida family of fonts.
+\end{itemize}
+There is also a very good FAQ on fonts that looks more generally on
+fonts with a good coverage of a variety of hardware and software
+platforms. Good start for a general overview of what is available.
+
+\end{Article}
+\endinput
+Bibliography
+
+Typefaces for desktop publishing --- a user guide, Black, Architecture
+Design and Technology Press.
+
+Good introduction with very useful bibliography. Scholarly coverage
+rather than the shallow approach found in the computer comics.
+
+Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice, Foley, Van Dam, Feiner, Hughes.
+Addison Wesley.
+
+Very good coverage of most aspects of computer graphics. The chapters
+on rasterisation are worth a read to get a wider perspective on the
+problems inherent in scalable fonts and
+display on low resolution devices.
+
+Visual and Technical Aspects of Type, Roger D. Hersch
+(Ed) CUP.
+Collection of papers by professionals from a range of disciplines.
+The 3 main sections are
+
+Letterforms: The Basics
+Digital Standards and Algorithms
+Typographic Research
+
+Based on lectures held at the first European summer school
+in Digital Typography held at Lausanne, 1991.
+
+Designing Instructional Text, James Hartley, Kogan Page.
+
+Good practical guidelines with coverage of text, illustrations,
+tables, graphs, diagrams, charts, symbols, forms, lists
+etc.
+
+Windows 3.1 Secrets, Livingston, Info World.
+
+Actually contains some information about True Type unlike the
+documentation that Microsoft provide. Effectively the technical
+manual that Microsoft should have provided with Windows.
+
+Raster Imaging and Digital Typography II, Morris and Andre
+(Eds), CUP.
+
+Collection of papers from Raster Imaging and Digital
+Typography 1991, held in Boston MA.
+Coverage of
+Outlines
+Greyscale
+Halftones
+Non-European type
+Rendering
+
+Publishing from the Desktop, Seybold and Dressler, Bantam.
+
+One of the better background books on dtp. Provides a good foundation
+to dtp, without the normal marketing hype found in the computer
+comics.
+