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

[Karl Berry]

Hi Laurence,

    I tried to check the archives to see if the subjects of this
    posting have been discussed recently, 

Not since our last conversation.

    something wrong with `lists.gnu.org'.

I emailed address@hidden about it, although they (hopefully) already know.

    The part that worries me most is the fact that some fonts are
    loaded in magnified form.  I just tested the following:

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

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

    I also think magnification is a poor way to generate extra-large fonts.  

Certainly true.

    It seems like doing this right would be a lot of work.

Also true.

    I've put a sample at
    `http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~lfinsto1/3DLDFtst.html'.

The math there looks very good.

    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.

I surmise that you're getting German by default because some such
variable is set to de or de_DE or ... in the system /etc/profile or
equivalent.

    `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 ...

Best,
Karl