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 Typography with TeX and LaTeX

Archive for the 'Fonts and Symbols' Category

Kpfonts 2.3 released

15 September 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

The version 2.3 of the font package kpfonts has been released on CTAN as announced today over the ctan-ann mailing list. Kpfonts provide an extensive set of fonts for LaTeX including roman, sans-serif, monospaced and math symbol fonts in regular and bold shape, true small caps and more.
The current release introduces

  • a new option nofligatures with no fi, fl, ff, ffi and ffl ligatures and redesigned f glyphs to achieve better results,
  • a new shape with slanted small caps.
  • improved small caps kerning.

To get more information have a look at the documentation.

Category: Fonts and Symbols | No Comments »

Character tables of fonts

16 June 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

If you are looking for a certain symbol or its number and you already know the font name, the fonttable package prints its character table for you. You could compile this small example, printing the table of the psyr font:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fonttable}
\begin{document}
\fonttable{psyr}
\end{document}

You will find the pdf output here.
Here is a part of the screenshot for a quick demonstration:

font character table by fonttable

This topic was discussed on mrunix.de and on Matheplanet.

Category: Fonts and Symbols | No Comments »

Increase font size

24 May 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

Sometimes the question is raised how to get bigger font sizes than the standard LaTeX command \Huge provides (see: font sizes).
It can easily done by using the \fontsize command followed by \selectfont. If unusual sizes are used the fix-cm package should be loaded. A small example for demonstration:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage{fix-cm}
\begin{document}
\fontsize{60}{70}\selectfont Huge text
\end{document}

That’s also a possibility to choose an intermediate size, for instance if \tiny gets too small and \scriptsize gets too big.

This topic was discussed in the LaTeX Community Forum, on CQF.info and on Matheplanet.

Category: Fonts and Symbols | No Comments »

Full justification with typewriter font

14 May 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

In a typewriter font aka monospaced font each character is given the same width. Monospaced fonts are frequently used by programmers to increase the readability of source code, but long text passages with monospace typeface are considerably less readable than those with variable-width fonts.

The space between words is fixed too, that prevents justification, and hyphenation may be disabled too. That’s useful for presenting source code, but sometimes a typewriter font is wanted but justification is required. This post will give some information how to fulfill that. We will use the Computer Modern Typewriter font (cmtt) you get by default when using \ttdefault, \ttfamily, \texttt.

The following code prints some of the font properties:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\ttdefault}
\begin{document}
\begin{description}
  \item[slant] \the\fontdimen1\font
  \item[interword space] \the\fontdimen2\font
  \item[interword stretch] \the\fontdimen3\font
  \item[interword shrink] \the\fontdimen4\font
  \item[extra space] \the\fontdimen7\font
  \item[xspaceskip] \the\xspaceskip
  \item[hyphenchar] \the\hyphenchar\font
\end{description}
\end{document}

The font cmtt10 is used, the result is:
slant 0.0pt
interword space 5.24995pt
interword stretch 0.0pt
interword shrink 0.0pt
extra space 5.24995pt
xspaceskip 0.0pt
hyphenchar -1

The space between words is 1em, the same is valid for the extra space following the end of a sentence. Zero stretch and shrink means the space between the words will always be 1em. The hyphenchar is set to -1, that’s why hyphenation is disabled. Let’s look how a normal text is set when typewriter is used:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\ttdefault}
\begin{document}
\section{Test}
\begin{minipage}{0.7\textwidth}
\blindtext
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

Output:

monospace typewriter (\ttfamily) flush left

To get justification I just modify some of the font parameters above, that the spaces may be stretched and shrinked. I use the everysel package to ensure that my changes are applied every time the font is selected. Further I set the \hyphenchar to the - symbol.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{everysel}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\ttdefault}
\EverySelectfont{%
\fontdimen2\font=0.4em% interword space
\fontdimen3\font=0.2em% interword stretch
\fontdimen4\font=0.1em% interword shrink
\fontdimen7\font=0.1em% extra space
\hyphenchar\font=`\-% to allow hyphenation
}
\begin{document}
\section{Test}
\begin{minipage}{0.7\textwidth}
\blindtext
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

This is the justified result:

monospace typewriter (\ttfamily) justified

We get full justification and a good grayness of the paragraph. One line shows that hyphenation is active though it was rarely necessary.

This topic was discussed on CQF.info. In the LaTeX Community Forum we talked about similar issues with font dimensions.

Category: Layout, Fonts and Symbols, plain TeX | No Comments »