Women in Technology

Article:		LaTeX: It's Not Just for Academia, Part 1
Subject:		Fonts and More...
Date:		2004-02-04 08:23:56
From:		bkerstetter
You can install fonts by following the instructions here: http://homepage.mac.com/bkerstetter/tex/fonttutorial-current.html If they do not work, please let me know. I maintain the document, but someone else (more experienced and much smarter) wrote the original. I have been using TeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt for 18 months and have never looked back. The learning curve is about the same as for Word, if you use Word with it's styles and such. The output is much much much much better. The typesetting is excellent. If you need to do complex layouts, LaTeX is pretty good, but ConTeXt is better. I currently do a multi-column monthly newsletter using LaTeX, but am switching to ConTeXt over the next several months. TeX and friends have there own set of frustrations, but I use the same source files to generate PDF, HTML and Word output (through a simple conversion process). I use the TeXShop frontend and the distribution of TeX by Gerben Wierda. The TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List is very helpful. Here are some links, some duplicated from the article. TeXShop: http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html gwTeX: http://www.rna.nl/tex.html TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• Fonts and More...
  2004-02-04 10:46:42  jimothy [View]
  
  
  Perhaps that'll address an issue I've had: LaTeX-generated documents are immediately identifiable because the font looks...somehow off. I'm not typesetting expert, so I can't put my finger on it, but the text doesn't have the appearance of a professionally typeset book, or even anything one might produce in Word or some other word processor. Perhaps it's the spacing between letters?
• Fonts and More...
  2004-02-06 15:30:17  maartensneep [View]
  
  
  No, certainly not the letter-spacing, it is the letter-shape, I think. I like LaTeX, but I can't stand Computer Modern, to the point of actually buying the Lucida typefaces (about US$ 250, that was the savings on the software ;-).
  
  The Computer Modern typeface, at least the serifed ones, have a very strong contrast (the difference in thickness of the up- and down-stroke of a letter; the difference between the thick and thin lines). On current printers the contrast is so large, it becomes hard to read -- vertical lines nearly dissappear. Older, lower-res printers "blurr" it a bit more, and then the effect isn't as striking. It doesn't bother me in the TeXBook (the description by D. E. Knuth, and that certainly is CM).
  
  On current LaTeX installations, you can try \usepackage{mathptmx} to see what happens with times (some maths letters are not available in the standard times typeface, and are faked or taken from CM. Other typefaces are available, even in a standard configuration.
  
  Maarten
• Fonts and More...
  2004-02-06 07:17:49  leoniedu [View]
  
  
  I think you are talking about how the "right margins looks somewhat ragged". There is a fix in pdftex for that. It basically does a compensation for an optical illusion... pretty cool.