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

[Laurence Finston]

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> It is built into TeX.  I'm sure the scaling of scaled fonts is 100%
> portable.

Good, one less thing to worry about.

> This is not surprising.  The answer is to use scalable fonts, which can
> be magnified more or less arbitrarily without the need to generate
> bitmaps.  In fact, TeX Live, teTeX, and probably other TeX systems come
> without any pregenerated bitmaps at all, and won't need to make any for
> the Computer Modern fonts.

This was a font I programmed myself with no "meta-ness".  It wasn't meant to
be as "bullet-proof" as a production font.  I found it convenient to generate
it in large sizes for testing purposes --- better for some purposes than using
a gray font.

I can see the state of my knowledge about fonts is out-of-date.
I was perfectly happy with bitmaps.  

> 
> I would suggest that the better way to handle this is to make a
> "documentation for the visually impaired" package, containing
> both the actual manuals at the large sizes and the tools/fonts to do the
> job.

Yes, I suppose you're right.  It's just that Texinfo already does so much that
such a package would have to duplicate.  I also think it would be nice to make
the existing GNU manuals available in extra-large type.
I wasn't trying to make work for the Texinfo developers.

Texinfo is the only way I know of for making  TeX-like HTML code.  I've heard
of tex4html, but I sort of had the impression it had been subsumed into
Texinfo.  I've never  looked into this.  I've only recently started thinking
about web programming more seriously.  I suppose for the moment I'll just have
to be satisfied with generating the math images at large sizes for Texinfo's
HTML output.  There are, after all, established ways of magnifying printed
material.  It's just a subject that interests me, and that I think is
worthwhile as a long-term goal.

> There is no need to read or understand anything about gettext.
> As I implied, if you set the LC_ALL environment variable to "POSIX", my
> belief is that you will get English output from Texinfo, Bison, or whatever.

Yes, I meant for using it in my own software, which is still monolingual.

Thanks,

Laurence