Fonts and optical scaling

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

High-quality fonts usually come with different variants dependent on the
character size: for instance, the 11p font is not equivalent to a scaled
10p font.  This is sometimes referred to as ``typographic'' (or
``nonlinear'', or ``optical'') scaling[0,1] as opposed to ``linear''
(i.e., automatic, geometric) scaling.  Examples of the difference it
makes are available in [2,3,4].

Knuth' Computer Modern fonts as well as Latin/European Modern fonts, for
instance, contain several ``font files'' (font metrics + printer fonts)
for various font widths: 10p, 11p, etc.

My question is: did anyone (and in particular Jeff) consider adding
support for such fonts in Lout?  That would mean that, e.g., if I use
Latin Modern in 11p, Lout would automatically switch to the right
typeface.  In practice, the address@hidden' structure and semantics would
need to be somewhat revised so that one can specify a series of names
and metrics.

Maybe this is something NonPareil should take into account.  ;-)

Thanks,
Ludovic.

[0] http://tug.org/tetex/html/fontfaq/cf_3.html
[1] http://www.typophile.com/wiki/Optical%20Scaling
[2] http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram/dtrg/typography/ist91.pdf
[3] http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/compsci/epo/papers/volume6/issue3/klassen.pdf
[4] http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/compsci/epo/papers/volume7/issue4/ep124ja.pdf