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Re: dvi.ps

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Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> wrote:
> .............................................................. As most 
> output devices nowadays have resolutions so far in excess of anything 
> whose dots your eyes can reasonably be expected to resolve, the METAFONT 
> mode is largely obsolescent: at some stage, TeX distributions set to 
> some default value like HP LaserJet 600×600 but I think nowadays 
> METAFONT has a setting called 'modeless' (I may be wrong on this: it's 
> been many decades since I needed to know, and texmf.cnf is singularly 
> unforthcoming).

OK, then that is a good default, and I suppose that answers my question;
there is then no need to deal with METAFONT modes (unless the user
explicitly specifies one); it already knows the resolution, so it can
just use the resolution alone to determine which file to load.

I cannot find a "modeless" setting in my computer (I looked in modes.mf,
which lists the modes, and texmf.cnf, which doesn't seem to mention the
METAFONT modes at all), and mktexpk just says mismatched mode. I looked at
the code for mktexpk; it is a shell script; it seems that "modeless" is
only for PostScript fonts, and is not for fonts made using METAFONT. It
also looks like it executes METAFONT to determine if the mode matches; if
it doesn't match, tries to guess using a hard-coded table. Although, it
seem like easily enough to add a "modeless" option for METAFONT-based
fonts into mktexpk (there are a few possible ways to do this, but in all
cases you would skip the check at the beginning in modeless mode for if
the mode and DPI does not match).

But maybe the version I have is old, and the new version does have such a
"modeless" setting that would do what would be needed if the user has not
specified any METAFONT mode.

> People do still use Postscript — some printers still have platemaking 
> equipment whose RIP only accepts Postscript — but most output is now PDF.

OK. I did not know that, but Ghostscript has the ability to output
level 2 PostScript (as well as PDF), so you can use that if you need that.

> A number of popular numeric and drawing packages still apparently produce 
> EPS output (my old favourite stats package, P-Stat, among them), but 
> it's easy to convert the EPS to PDF for embedding in a [La]TeX document.

OK, although I don't use EPS, nor those programs, nor LaTeX, nor pdfTeX.
If I need graphics made from data from another program, I will generally
instead write a program in PostScript to read that file and plot the data.
But EPS works too if that is what you are using.

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dvi.ps news@zzo38computer.org.invalid - 2020-06-04 16:50 -0700
  Re: dvi.ps luser droog <luser.droog@gmail.com> - 2020-06-04 18:16 -0700
    Re: dvi.ps news@zzo38computer.org.invalid - 2020-06-04 19:50 -0700
      Re: dvi.ps luser droog <luser.droog@gmail.com> - 2020-06-04 23:57 -0700
  Re: dvi.ps ken <ken@spamcop.net> - 2020-06-05 08:02 +0100
    Re: dvi.ps news@zzo38computer.org.invalid - 2020-06-05 10:07 -0700
      Re: dvi.ps ken <ken@spamcop.net> - 2020-06-05 18:29 +0100
  Re: dvi.ps Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2020-06-05 22:53 +0100
    Re: dvi.ps news@zzo38computer.org.invalid - 2020-06-05 20:13 -0700

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