A PostScript-based L^ATEX

PS-L^ATEX is a modified version of L^ATEX. Rather than use the Computer Modern family of fonts (CM) developed by Donald Knuth, PS-L^ATEX tries to use PostScript¹ fonts wherever possible. This has a number of advantages:

• There are a large number of fonts available for PostScript devices. Format designers can choose fonts more appropriate to their documents, rather than being restricted to the CM set.
• Sending a document to a PostScript device can be much faster, as large character bitmaps need not be sent. Also, the disk space required by the bitmap fonts can be saved.
• PostScript fonts can be arbitrarily scaled and rotated by the PostScript device.

• At present there are no PostScript fonts that can entirely take the place of the CMEX, CMSY and CMMI fonts, and also the L^ATEX circle, line and symbol fonts, without some loss of compatibility with L^ATEX. Therefore, these fonts are still required.
• The scalability of the PostScript fonts implies that they are not as good at all point sizes as fonts specially designed to a size.
• The CM and PostScript encodings of character positions are quite different; this means that substantial modification is required to L^ATEX, and that any files that depend on specific character encodings (using \char or \mathchar, for instance) may not work properly with PS-L^ATEX.
• The device driver that converts from TEX² DVI format to PostScript must be capable of coping with device-resident fonts.
• Some of the information required by TEX (such as that for positioning of accents) is unavailable in the PostScript fonts, or only available in different forms, which means that output may not be of optimal quality.
• It is unlikely that documents produced with PS-L^ATEX can be previewed on a bitmap display, as PostScript previewers are still scarce.

Having enumerated all the drawbacks, it's worth saying that most of them are not likely to affect the casual user of PS-L^ATEX(except perhaps the last). However, sophisticated users should bear in mind the limitations. A detailed list of extensions and restrictions to L^ATEX can be found in Sections and .

In use, PS-L^ATEX should behave just as L^ATEX does (except for the restrictions documented below). No modifications should be required to L^ATEX documents; PS-L^ATEX is not a style or style option; it replaces the standard L^ATEX ``format'' file (lplain.fmt) with another, called pslplain.fmt. This can be invoked explicitly by VIRTEX, so:

     $ virtex
     This is TeX 2.0 (no format preloaded)
     **&pslplain \input file
     (file.tex
     PostScript-based LaTeX, Version 0.99
     ...

     $ pslatex file
     This is TeX 2.0 (preloaded format=pslplain 88.4.31)
     (file.tex
     PostScript-based LaTeX, Version 0.99
     ...

• Extensions to L^ATEX within PS-L^ATEX
• Features of L^ATEX unavailable in PS-L^ATEX
• Installing PS-L^ATEX
  • Possible Problems
  
  
• Acknowledgements