Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: TECH: more help?

From:Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...>
Date:Saturday, June 24, 2006, 1:58
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

Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>