[help-texinfo] Re: Magnification, math images, and figures

[Laurence Finston]

Hi Karl et al,

> Scaling scaled fonts technically works fine, I don't exactly see
> anything "risky" about it.

Well, you should know.   I thought it might not work at all, and I thought
that even if I got it to work on my system, that wouldn't necessarily mean it
would work on other systems.  I don't know much about different
implementations of TeX.  On the systems I use, `kpathsea' always tries to
generate missing fonts, but I don't know whether it's used on all systems.  I
remember when I was working on fonts, that I could only generate some fonts up
to a certain size before some Metafont error or other occurred, mostly a
number that became too large.  If I recall correctly, \magnification=20000
(i.e., 20x) was about the limit for one of them.

> 
>     I think it would be better to distribute fonts along with a
>     `texi2dvi' and `makeinfo', specially made for creating large-type 
> output.  
> 
> Do such fonts exist?  I'm not aware of any.

No, I meant to generate them in the appropriate sizes, taking care of any
errors, and distributing the `gf', `pk', and `tfm' files with the package.
I seem to remember there being a cmr17, but there's no TeX on this system, so
I can't check.  The math fonts are probably not available in large sizes.

> Remind me why we want these huge fonts in the first place?  Making slides?

No, the purpose is access for the visually impaired.  The problem with the
HTML output is that the math mode material, like the other images, and unlike
the plain text, isn't scalable.

I think it might be worthwhile to generate a suitable range of the cm fonts in
large sizes, making any necessary corrections.   Perhaps I'll get around to
this someday.

>     I've put a sample at
>     `http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~lfinsto1/3DLDFtst.html'.
> 
> The math there looks very good.

Thanks!  I generated it in a fairly large size, using `\magstep5'.

> 
>     One problem I have is that the `makeinfo' here speaks German,
> 
> export LC_ALL=POSIX
> Perhaps LANG and/or LC_MESSAGES and/or other such variables need to
> unset or changed as well.

Great, thanks.  I'm glad it's not fixed at compile time.  I printed out the
`gettext' documentation, but after seeing how long it is, I decided to
delegate the task.  The problem is, I have no one to delegate it to.

>     `makeinfo --help' doesn't say anything about an option for
>     overriding it.
> 
> I guess I could add something mentioning these envvars, except another
> volunteer is working on some code to finally have makeinfo use
> the @documentlanguage words when appropriate.  One way or another ...

I don't really understand how internationalization is supposed to work.  I
have the same problem with the `.output' file generated by Bison, which I
distribute.

Thanks,

Laurence