Re: TECH: more help?

On 24/06/06, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> On 6/23/06, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> > > Unfortunately, the default font is, as mentioned, fugly.
> > *nods*
Computer Modern Roman is very dependent on the quality of the output
device to look good. I currently have a slightly dodgy workgroup color
laser printer, and the output of CMR is fantastic, and it looks pretty
good on most of the printers at Uni. But it looks appalling printed
from my consumer-level b&w laser printer. O'course, it's a lot easier
to change your font than your printer, and you've *still* got to cope
with seeing it onscreen...

> You can convince pdfLaTeX to use any TTF font, but it doesn't know
> about your system's font folder, and it requires that you create
> several extra files to teach the LaTeX parts of the system about the
> font.  It's quite a pain, really.  I'm surprised no one is
> distributing an automated  "tell LaTeX about all my system fonts"
> program.
They are, assuming all your system fonts are in OpenType or TrueType
format. Check out XeTeX on SIL's website. But presently it only works
on MacOS X & in test form for GNU/Linux. However, it takes advantage
of nifty OpenType features and requires no preprocessing to work, so
it's kept in sync with the system fonts, same as e.g. OpenOffice.org
or Word. It's been developed on Mac OS X for longer and takes
advantage of the system libraries, so there are niftycool features
that only work on OS X at present.

> > Also easily fixable in principle -- but I don't know how well
> > alternative fonts play with things such as mathematics mode or IPA.
Because of the commonness of Times, it probably has the best support.
\usepackage{times} for the body font; it also gives you the amazingly
ugly combination of Helvetica for sans and Courier for typewriter (I
wish there were fonts that actually blended well with Times for
this!). Loading the right package gives you maths mode Times, but I
forget what it is. Loading Times before TIPA should give you Maths
mode IPA.

Of course, I don't like Times a whole lot more than I like CMR, and
once you say that you're limiting your choices significantly! Still
looking for the perfect IPA font... (I like the idea behind Gentium's
IPA characters, but not the actual letter shapes i.e. the fact that
its upsidedown characters don't just look like someone's got a piece
of type and rotated it 180 degrees, but they've actually taken the
time to develop the character. Something like it, but more
conventional a la Caslon or Palatino or something would be nice.)

> The key is that TTF fonts use Unicode; one of the things you have to
> set up when enabling LaTeX to use your TTF fonts is a Unicode mapping.
Any reasonable set of instructions for using TrueType fonts with TeX
will make it easy-to-use; then you just type the actual UTF-8
character into your document.

> > I think that was on purpose, on the principle that the maximum number
> > of characters on a line for easy reading shouldn't be more than "x",
>
> Yes, it was on purpose.  That doesn't make it any less wasteful or
> stupid-looking. :)
Your only other option for legibility is multiple columns. But anyway,
if you thought LaTeX was bad in that regard, you obviously haven't
seen pre-modern typography. LaTeX uses about half the page by default
(at least, the text block on A4 paper is about the size of A5, but
maybe it's different on the quaint :) American size). In a previous
era, that would've been very cheap; 44% I think was about the norm
(leaving 56% for margins!).

Personally, strikes me that Word document with 2.5 cm margins are ugly
(and hard to read, too)! Maybe the extra 0.4 mm around an inch margin
affords makes the difference :)

--
Tristan.

Reply