Textures & ATM

The Adobe Type Manager is a Control Panel that images PostScript fonts for the screen and non-Postscript printers.

Without ATM installed, the Textures typeset preview screen looks jagged and blocky:

It is always a good idea to have the latest version of ATM. Old versions do not work with newer releases of MacOS.

How to get the latest version

Adobe Type Manager Lite is available free from Adobe.

Recommended Character Cache Size

If you use the Computer Modern or AMS Fonts in PostScript format with Plain TeX or AMS-TeX, we recommend setting character cache size to at least 512K. Set the cache larger if you will be using these fonts with either LaTeX or the AMS preprint style, since these styles use significantly more fonts than Plain TeX. If you use PostScript format fonts with TeX, setting the font cache below 256K may result in unacceptably slow screen display.

Once ATM renders a font for display, it is stored in the Character Cache. If information for that font is needed again, it is simply recalled from the cache.

If ATM needs to render more fonts after the cache is full, however, it will write over previously rendered fonts. If the font that has been overwritten is needed again later, ATM must go back and re-render it.

Excessive font rendering slows not only screen or non-PostScript printer display, but application performance as well. Therefore, it's important to allocate ATM enough memory to do that job efficiently.