[R] MetaPost device?

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On 6 Apr 2000, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:

> Ross Ihaka <ihaka at stat.auckland.ac.nz> writes:
> 
> > One option (which I've discussed a bit with Paul) would be to use the
> > GNU vector fonts in place of native device fonts -- this would really
> > simplify writing device drivers.  The problem is that the GNU fonts
> > don't have a complete Latin1 encoding.  
> 
> ...which would likely generate death threats from the general
> direction of Scandinavia, where people actually use the Æ and Ø
> letters! Of course, all you need to do is to implement those letters
> in the GNU fonts (*first*).

There is also the question of font quality here, and what to do about
people wanting Japanese or Korean or those strange characters
mathematicians use or ....  On platforms with decent fonts (e.g. those with
Adobe ATM and X servers with commercial type 1 fonts -- I haven't tried the
free ones but there is noticeable difference under ghostscript between the
real and URW type 1 fonts) I would want to make use of the expertise of the
font implementors.

The MetaPost examples in the LaTeX Graphics Companion suggest fonts should
be an easy matter: they also show that it is easy to design awful graphs in
MetaPost.  There is apparently a fig2mf program, which might (a) eliminate
the job if anyone writes a fig driver (b) show what needs to be done.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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