Re: lout output in ghostscript

[Hanuš Adler]

Hello,

thanks for the answer.

On Fri, Oct 01, 1999 at 09:26:38PM +0400, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 01, 1999 at 06:36:43PM +0200, Hanu? Adler wrote:
> > I'd suggest that some latin2 ps fonts should be included in the lout
> > distribution ...
> 
> Several people from .pl and .cz that I talked to use QuasiPalladio
> family with Lout.  I guess this font is sort of standard for Latin2

Where could I get the font, or more fonts, and where do I find some docs
on how to set them up for lout / includeres to work with? Any FAQ on
this anywhere on the net?

> I recall someone recently proposed (volunteered? :-) to prepare such
> add-on packages for popular font families, so doing this for Latin2 or
> Cyrillic will be in line with that proposal and, I think, with the Tao
> of Lout.  I was somewhat cold towards the idea at the time, but giving
> it a second thought, I now think that's good to have a packaging
> scheme like that.

Of course it is a good idea. However to make it work for an average
would-be user like me, it must be really easy to install.

Well, maybe it is not as good an idea. When I'm thinking about it,
I feel it would be better to include these packages in the basic
distribution of lout for several reasons:

- if those packages aren't part of lout, they won't be included in the
  prepackaged distributions of lout (redhat, debian packages) which
  average users tend to use.

- I know a lot of people who live or study abroad. If lout comes with
  iso-8859-1 only by default, those people studying in Western Europe,
  U.S. or Australia will simply have no acces to it on University
  servers. My own experience is that it is almost impossible to convince
  an administrator to install latin2 support for anything, especially if
  it is not quite trivial.

- It is simply unfair... Why should some admins have a more difficult
  installation than others?

and last, which I perceive as maybe the most important:

- lout should not be perceived as a frontend to Postscript. That means
  if Postscript is limited to several "basic" fonts, lout should not
  copy this limitation. To the contrary, postscript should be perceived
  only as a means, one of many, of displaying what the author described
  through lout.

> I hope I addressed your concerns.

Partly, yes. It is good to think about making lout more user friendly
and I am glad to have brought you to the issue. However, since I still
cannot really use it, I still feel a bit frustrated.

Maybe some step-by-step description like where to get the fonts, what
exactly to do so that lout can find them, etc. would be more helpful.

Yours,

Hanus Adler

-- 
              A wise man makes his own decisions, an 
              ignorant man follows the public opinion.
                              ---- Chinese Proverb