Times italic "f" usually has the most egregious issue with superscripts and accents (particularly hacek and macron (overbar)), since its top hangs quite far over. (That's also the reason for the ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl ligatures--in the really old days of metallic type, if you tried to put those combinations together with single letters, you'd break off the f's overhang!) As far as samples of CTI's composition, I don't remember the names of the books that were done, just some of the publishers--Houghton Mifflin, Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, and John Wiley come to mind, but I'm not certain. I do know that a number of AMS journals were produced by CTI, probably around 1972-1973. I might be able to recognize the typesetting if I saw it. I do remember one jr high or high school math textbook that was done with non-standard (i.e., not Times-Roman) fonts; I think they decided to use a sans serif font resulting in something not very pretty. I'm not familiar with TeX's kerning facility (and the last I looked, which was a very long time ago, it didn't have any), but typical kerning is done by a table of character pairs within the same font and size. CTI kerning was done by letter shape and could handle any horizontal juxtaposition of characters, even if they were from different fonts and at different sizes/obliquenesses/baseline (as would happen with subscripts and superscripts, math symbols, greek letters, etc.). --ms On 2012-10-22 17:55, Gareth McCaughan wrote:
Mike Speciner wrote:
There was this company called Composition Technology [CTI] in the early '70s ... The software knew about fonts and characters and did kerning to properly position operators, sub- and superscripts, over and under characters [e.g., accents, overbars, sum and integral limits], particularly important with the beautiful Times Italic font. AFAIK, no one does kerning anymore, and so special, more upright fonts are used to make things look less bad. TeX is semi-smart about these things. It doesn't have separate positions for each (character,accent) pair -- it has general facilities for kerning, of course, but accented characters aren't considered instances of that -- but does let you say "this font slants by so much, so adjust accents accordingly". Empirically, I haven't noticed TeX-typeset accent positions being bad. (There *are* positioning and spacing things TeX does that I find very unsatisfactory, but that isn't one.) But then, I suspect that our tastes differ. I agree that the Times italic is elegant, but I find its roman so ugly that I'd never use it.
I too would be interested in examples of books typeset with CTI's software.