Dvipage 3.0

[Neil Hunt]

In view of the recent interest in TeX previewers not using PXL fonts, this
is to inform folks that dvipage 3.0 has been available for a couple of
months, and offers the capability to read GF fonts.  The code is much
extended over 2.0 in the area of font reading, including using the closest
substitute font when the desired font is missing, and reading combinations
of GF or PXL fonts as appropriate.

Dvipage on a monochrome sun offers similar functionality to dvisun,
displaying your page using 118 dpi fonts, about 1.5 times larger than real
size (on standard 1152 x 900 sun screens).  Smaller fonts lose too many
thin strokes to aliasing, and become marginally readable.

Dvipage on a colour or grey scale machine, however, uses the 300 dpi fonts
(the same bits as are sent to a LaserWriter, for example), and performs
spatial filtering before sampling down to 75 dpi.  The grey scale
capability of the display is used to compensate for the reduced spatial
resolution, and the text remains rather readable at this resolution, which
also permits a whole 8.5 x 11 (or A4) page to be displayed on the screen
at once.  A magnifier which displays the full resolution text on the page
can be used to inspect tiny subsubscripts and other small details in this
mode.

Dvipage is based upon the dvisun code:
      ``Mark Senn wrote the early versions of [dvisun] for the
	BBN BitGraph. Stephan Bechtolsheim, Bob Brown, Richard
	Furuta, James Schaad and Robert Wells improved it. Norm
	Hutchinson ported the program to the Sun. Further bug fixes
	by Rafael Bracho at Schlumberger.''

I improved the user interface, added the image processing stuff, and
incorporated font reading code adapted from the MIT driver distribution.
I extend thanks to these authors, and others whose names have escaped
recording.

Dvipage was put together while I was at Schlumberger Palo Alto Research,
which has now moved to Austin, TX, and become SLCS.  I have now moved to
Teleos Research, and questions, comments and bug fixes should be addressed
to me at:

	Internet:			Neil at Teleos.com
	More explicitly:		Neil%Teleos.com at AI.SRI.com.
	UUCP			     ...!decwrl!argosy!teleos!Neil

[[ dvipage is also now available in the Rice archives.  It has replaced
the old version and is available under "sun-source" as "dvipage-shar[1234]".
It can be retrieved via anonymous FTP from the host "titan.rice.edu" or
via the archive server.  For more information about the archive server,
send a mail message containing the word "help" to the address
"archive-server at rice.edu".  --wnl ]]