From: tlm@iastate.edu (Dr. T.L. Marchioro II)
Subject: Postscript Alternatives to Math Fonts (Long)
Summary: Review of postscript math options for TeX
Keywords: Postscript, Fonts, Y&Y, BSR, MathTime
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 19:10:46 GMT


There have recently been several threads regarding Postscript Math
fonts, opinions on the MathTime fonts, integrating TeX and Postscript,
and, my favorite, "Computer Modern: The Spam of Typefaces" in this
group.  Several people have requested information about postscript
TeX fonts, and I thought people might be interested in my experiences
regarding this in the last 6 months (Actually, threads along these
lines seem to crop up every 6-8 weeks or so, perhaps someday this
could get into the FAQ?) Like many of the people posting in these
threads, I was interested in the possibility of doing my TeX with
postscript fonts, including *math fonts*.  I started prowling
around, looking through samples, talking to people, etc.  It took
me several months to make a choice (I eventually settled on the
Lucida fonts from Y & Y software) and I changed my mind back and
forth several times.

I'll begin with three minor "provisos" since they'll be somewhat relevant
below, particularly as regards the "subjective" aspects of evaluating a 
font:  
(1)  I use a NeXT for all of my TeXing (it's a near perfect
environment for TeX thanks to Tom Rokicki and some other really
good PD software) and because the NeXT has Display Postscript (and
virtually all of it's applications can import and export EPS) using
Postscript fonts is extremely attractive.
(2)  I also have a 400 dpi NeXT laserwriter.  This also affects the 
"subjective" aspects because, to my eye, there is often an enormous
difference in fonts between 300 dpi (as in the Apple LW) and 400 dpi.
My opinions are all based on the latter.
(3)  In the course of acquiring my fonts I ended up doing some "consulting"
for Y & Y for which I received compensation.  So I'm not completely
"at arm's length" here, but I don't feel particularly biased, and,
in fact, have both good and bad things to say about every font I'll
discuss below, including the ones from Y & Y.

I was interested in getting Postscript TeX fonts primarily for two
reasons:  (1) I had never liked CM that much, particularly the math
fonts on Apple laserwriters, where they tended to look "spindly"
(this is far less noticeable at 400 or 600 dpi) and  (2) so I could
have "two way transparency" between TeX and many of the other
computer packages I use regularly, particularly Mathematica and
its notebook front end and various graphics programs. While beta
testing the new version of NeXT-TeX I hounded Rokicki about adding
an "encapsulated" PS option to dvips, which he finally did.  This
made TeX a lot more powerful in terms of using its output in other
packages. Unfortunately, because the CM fonts are bitmapped resizing
the EPS output leads to aliasing errors, ruining one of the best
things about Postscript, i.e. it's device independent resolution.
So, I started looking at PS math fonts for TeX, especially ones
that weren't just the same old "Spam of Typefaces."

The EPS option really expands the uses of TeX since it allows TeX
output to be straightforwardly incorporated into drawing programs, 
desktop publishing set-ups, etc.  Instead of having to make a figure 
in a drawing program and then including it in TeX, one instead has the
option to make an equation, table, or text in TeX,  and drop it into a 
graphics program where arrows or figures etc. can be added. I'm 
particularly hopeful that I can forever forget about SliTeX now.
Just scroll the TeX you want on a slide, pipe it to EPS, and drop the
output into a "presentation builder" application or graphics package
where you can rescale, translate, rotate, colorize, etc. etc.  While
some of these abilities are NeXT-specific, most of them can also be 
done on Macs, and, I believe, with Microsoft Windows. Nothing is 
lost (to my knowledge) by going to Type 1 PS fonts, and a great 
deal is gained.  

The fonts I looked at carefully were:

1)  The MathTime fonts of Michael Spivak
2)  The Adobe Mathematical Pi series.
3)  The Computer Modern PS Fonts from Blue Sky Research (also sold by Y & Y).
4)  LucidaBright and LucidaNewMath from Y & Y.  

Impressions of each:
1)  Of all the fonts I looked at the ones I liked best from an
aesthetic point of view were the MathTime fonts.  MathTime is
similar to CM math fonts, but tuned to match Times-Roman instead
of Computer Modern, so they look less "wispy" on laserwriter output.
They really match Times-Roman well, giving a page of text + equations
an overall "cohesion" you don't always seen in the Computer Modern
family.  My objections to the MathTime fonts were that they were
expensive  --- $100 educational, which is low as fonts go, but
MathTime comes with very few characters. There are only about 2.5
fonts total (approximately 300 characters), and many characters I
really want aren't there (for example, hbar, which, as a physicist,
I need all the time and would like to have as a separate character
instead of a composite).  MathTime also does not include any actual
math italic font, meaning, as near as I could tell, you'd have to
mix in either cmmi or else use Times-Italic for math.  I wanted a
100% Postscript solution, so the former was out, and the latter is
aesthetically displeasing and could be confusing.  While I was
extremely tempted by MathTime, I also had the feeling that Times-Roman,
while one of my favorites, is also a "tired" typeface, and if I
was going to settle for that I could just get PS versions of the
CM fonts (see below).

MathTime fonts were designed by Michael Spivak, and are available from him
or from Radical Eye Software (who bring you dvips!).  If Spivak ever 
"finishes" the fonts by adding real math italics and some more 
commonly needed symbols (HBAR!!!) then I'll certainly add the fonts to
my system.

2)  The Adobe Mathematical Pi collection was extremely intriguing.
It's a collection of 4-6 (partial) fonts (I'm not sure of the exact 
number of unique glyphs) full of various mathematical characters
sold by Adobe Systems.  There's a wide collection of symbols, a
full set of very nice "curly script" letters (which TeX, even
AMS-TeX, still lacks), a calligraphic font, etc.  I got font samples
from the Adobe "FAX-back" line (only for MathPi 1-4, not the other
two) and pored over them, but while I liked the characters, it does
not seem there is any way to actually replace all of the TeX math
characters with MathPi ones (again, I did not see any full Math
Italic font, but that may have been in the two fonts I didn't get)
nor is it even clear how to use the fonts with TeX since their
encoded in a very unusual manner --- for example, the "curly script"
capitals are scattered all over the keyboard with other totally
unrelated characters interspersed.  I suspect you'd have to reencode
from .afm to .tfm by hand.  I posted to this group to see if anyone
had successfully integrated these fonts into TeX and received only
several "tell me if you figure this out" responses.

The fonts are available from Adobe, and I would be glad to help out
anyone who wants to integrate them into TeX, but I suspect it's a 
big job.  

3)  The Type 1 Computer Modern fonts from BSR:
What can I say, they're Computer Modern, so we all know what they
look like :-)  I have several friends who have these fonts and they
all are very pleased with them.  You can scale them to arbitrary
sizes  --- this in and of itself can be very useful.  As as pointed
out in the "Spam" thread, it's not so much the font that is tired
but the "styles" in which it's used.  Being able to give Section
Titles, etc.  which aren't limited to being a certain \magstep over
the text will spruce up the look of a document (kind of like cheese
sauce on Spam I suppose.... :-)  Another advantage of these fonts
would be the space they could save you by eliminating .pk files.
This is particularly true with a machine like my NeXT, which prints
regularly to both 300 dpi and 400 dpi printers, so you need a full
set of .pk files at both resolutions, which hogs more disc space
than the entire Type 1 CM distribution.  To give an example:  the .pfb
(binary) font files for the type 1 CM fonts take up about 2 Mb, while
the 300 dpi .pk files alone are close to 6.5 Mb.  

I rate these fonts highly.  They look good even at small sizes and
lower (i.e. on the screen at 91 dpi) resolutions, unlike the PD
versions generated by MFtoPS (the latter also have significantly
larger outline files, for reasons I don't know).  The full set of
75 CM fonts (approximately 9600 unique glyphs) is available from
either Blue Sky or Y & Y for $195 (educational).  This makes them
a far better buy than the MathTime ones, on the rather foolish
$/character basis (would anyone buy art that way? :-)  They also
have packages which include the LaTeX/SLiTeX fonts, and the AMS-TeX
fonts.  I know that Y & Y has added 58 accented characters to their
fonts over and above the normal TeX characters, I *think* BSR has
not done this, but do know the "basic" 128 characters in each font
are identical since Y & Y gets them from BSR.

4)  The LucidaBright + LucidaNewMath Fonts
(First, I want to stress that these fonts ARE NOT Lucida and Lucida Math
available from Adobe Systems. Those fonts, as I understand it, cannot be
used with TeX.  LB and LNM are available, to my knowledge, only from Y & Y)
At the same time I was examining (and almost buying) the type 1 CM fonts, 
I contacted Y & Y for some samples of their LucidaBright package. LB + LNM is
designed to be a full type 1  replacement for the basic TeX fonts.
You just input a macro file at the top of your document and all of
the basic font families are remapped to LB + LNM (it's just such a macro file
which does not seem to be around for the Math Pi fonts). Add any personal
TeX definitions you like to use and any old document should come out
just fine.  

After some thought I went with the LucidaBright option because (a)
it was a "good value" ($165 educational for over 4000 characters
--- again, $/character is *not* a defining criteria, just a guideline)
(b) it includes all of the symbols found in the AMS-TeX fonts (I
occasionally need these, and the Type 1 CM fonts package above does
not include the AMS fonts, that package is another $115) (c) they
come with lots of extras, like a Calligraphic font and a Blackletter
font, and, most important (d) I basically liked the look, but it
*wasn't* Computer Modern.  That is, for my money I was getting
something new and different, and still had the option to go back
to bitmapped CM fonts anytime I wanted by just commenting out the
\input lines for LB + LNM.

I've been using the fonts actively for a couple weeks now and have
really grown to like them.  At first there was still this tendency
to go "uh.... the math looks funny" becuase it's not Computer Modern
--- which at this point is literally imprinted in all brains ---
but after a few days that wears off and it's really a nice font.
The text is extremely clear (particularly on the screen), and works
well in TeX and all of the other NeXT applications.  The math is
fine, although I still tend to prefer CM for some things (mainly
some of the display operators; and I don't like the hbar much, but
my friends all say it's fine, so perhaps I just have an hbar "thing"
:-).  As with the MathTime fonts, there's an overall "cohesion" to
the fonts which Times-Roman + CM math, or even CM + CM math lacks
(TR + MathTime is still best on this scale though).  I'd probably
have to rank LB as "less elegant" than Times-Roman, which is a real
classic in my mind, but it has the advantage of being "fresh" which
makes the printed page far more interesting to the eye.

I think that covers all of the possibilities.  I would recommend
to anyone interested in going the PS route that you take your time
and look at the fonts carefully. Buying a font you don't like is
probably like buying a shirt you don't like, it soon makes it way
to the back of the closet and lives there until you throw it away.
Make sure you have a realistic sample to judge from --- I couldn't
tell anything about LucidaBright vs. type 1 Computer Modern from the
samples Y & Y originally sent me because the document was formatted
in a way I would never use, and the math sample wasn't in any way
similar to the work I do.  I put together a simple 2-3 page TeX
file and E-mailed it to Y & Y and they sent me back what it looked
like in type 1 CM, Lucida, Times-Roman, etc.  Only then could I make a 
proper comparison.  My past dealings with Spivak, Rokicki, Adobe, and
Y & Y have shown me that they're all "good people" and are willing to
do whatever is necessary to help people make good decisions (I've never
dealt directly with BSR, but have heard nothing but complimentary things
about them).

I hope this is helpful for anyone thinking of going the PS TeX font option.

Tom