dpi? (was: preserving / ressurecting old docs?

On Sat, 30 Jun 2001, Davison, Lee wrote: If you make characters that are a 7 by 9 pixel matrix (the coarsest that most people will EVER tolerate), how are you going to get 80 characters per line with less than 70dpi? There were and are many POS printers. Besides, by this time of day, I can't print a straight line, either. In the late 80s, I had to make a lot of the fonts that I needed. (Cordata and HP compatible soft fonts) When using CX engine laser printers, at 300dpi, there were DEFINITELY single pixel features at 1/300". 300 dpi is so damn coarse, that you can't even make a GOOD serif. The entire reason for "hinting" in Adobe Postscript fonts is entirely because 1/300" is NOT good enough resolution for algorithmically reduced fonts, and would LOSE features. I made one font for in-house archiving that consisted of a 7 by 9 PIXEL (also made a 5 x 7) font mimicing the PC character set at 300dpi. Our "Fiche font" permitted squeezing a LOT of text onto a page. I could take what would otherwise have been a few hundred pages, and fold it up and stuff it in a posket. Every pixel was clear and distinct. The later SX engines overflowed the pixel cell with each dot, making for a MUCH richer black, but blurring the pixels together. (That was before presbyopia set in. Now I need significant optical assistance to read my old materials.) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com