tlug: NTT JTeX: font problems

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Matt" == Matt Gushee <matt@example.com> writes:

    Matt> When I print out I get, well, "artifacts"--little black
    Matt> rectangles or trapezoids on some of the kanji. The number of
    Matt> them seems to vary according to the font size--e.g., 12
    Matt> point has very few, while 10 point has more and 11 point is
    Matt> terrible. At any given size, they appear on all instances of
    Matt> the affected character.

This happens on both the screen output and on paper?

If you get them on screen then try a screen capture (xwd, or xv's grab 
function), and send the GIF as a MIME attachment.

Anyway, this is probably a problem in the rasterization.  Some
versions of Ghostscript (I assume since you refer to the Mincho font
you're using Ghostscript) had rasterization problems.  It's very
difficult to get the boundary conditions right, and of course the
working algorithm would get broken every so often in the process of
squeezing out efficiency.  What version of Ghostscript are you using?

Another possibility is that somehow Ghostscript is confused about the
resolution of the output device; it's possible you have Epson 72dpi
configuration hanging around somewhere.  Try adding a `-r300' (or
whatever your device resolution is) to the invocation.

    Matt> I wonder if the black goobers have anything to do with the
    Matt> many checksum errors that I get whenever I run dvips or xdvi
    Matt> on a Japanese TeX file.  And I wonder if the checksum errors

Probably not.  They don't access the Ghostscript fonts.  Does your
xdvi produce Japanese?  I suppose not....

    Matt> have anything to do with the way I have my TeX trees set up:
    Matt> I built JTeX under /usr/local/lib, but I also have a
    Matt> preexisting TeTeX installation under /usr/lib--and I am
    Matt> using the dvips and xdvi from this old installation.

Yes, that would likely generate the checksum errors.  These probably
occur on Computer Modern fonts?  I don't know much about this.  I
suspect that you need to regenerate the .pk and .tfm files with the
new metafont.  But I think you can ignore them.  That's what I do.
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