adam@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Adam H. Lewenberg) (10/18/90)
My original question > Several dvi->ps programs allow the use of built-in PostScript fonts >in TeX files. Unfortunately there are no built-in PS math fonts so you >must still use the CM fonts for math stuff. If anyone has generated a >document using the PS fonts, I would like to hear how it came out. Do >the CM math fonts clash horribly with the PS fonts? Is there one PS >font that looks best (least bad?) with the CM fonts? Any suggestions >or tips an the best way to go about integrating the PS fonts with TeX? I got a few responses. A couple of peopler were of the opinion that PS fonts and CM math just don't mix. The answer from Bernard M.E. Moret may be of interest to others (I have edited it slightly after our mailer mangled it): I typeset the complete text that I wrote with Henry Shapiro, ``Algorithms from to NP, Volume I: Design and Efficiency,'' using LaTeX, PicTeX, and a large number of homemade macros. The font is Adobe Palatino, but all of the math is in CM; I remapped the greek symbols into higher CM codes to keep greek capitals. The two fonts are very different; they don't exactly clash, but they certainly make all of the math stand out. The worst problem we had (and one we did not really solve) was periods, commas, and parentheses, because all three are commonly used in math as well as in text. The periods are fortunately very similar; the commas, on the other hand, are totally different, so that we could not use CM commas with text nor Palatino commas with math, with curious results when typesetting something like ... let the set $S$ have elements $x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n$, where .... Parentheses were even worse: the Palatino parens are fairly thick and not very tall; the CM math parens are taller, slanted, and thinner. We had to find ways around text that originally read ... sentence ends here. (Note that this modification reduces the running time from $\Theta(n^2)$ to $\Theta(n\log n)$.) New sentence starts here ... because the two parens clash abominably. Although Palatino was chosen for us by the book designer, I tried also Times, Bookman, AvantGarde, and Optima, and must say that Palatino looked by far the best to my eye. Integration of the two, except for remapping the capital greek characters, was straightforward; we used the ArborTexT special mapped tfm fonts by arrangement with the printer; these metric files gave much better kerning (this was before virtual fonts, sigh...) than the tfm files available with the standard distribution and also allowed ligatures and such. With virtual fonts, however, all of this becomes much easier and much more flexible. Our book will appear in mid-November at Benjamin-Cummings; you can then judge for yourself how well/badly it came out. We have a second volume in the works, to be published in about 12-15 months (we hope), and for which I'll use virtual fonts and put to use all of the various things that I learned too late when doing Volume I; but, to my mind, mixing the fonts is not the hard part... Bernard M.E. Moret Department of Computer Science (505) 277-31{31,12} University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131 moret@cmell.cs.unm.edu I am certainly looking forward to seing this book. Adam H. Lewenberg adam@symcom.math.uiuc.edu University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Dept. Of Mathematics INTERNET: adam@symcom.math.uiuc.edu or a-lewenberg@uiuc.edu
amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker) (10/19/90)
There are a couple of alternatives to Computer Modern as far as math goes. Adobe sells a set of three PostScript fonts that provide symbol, math italic, and math extension characters, collectively called "Lucida Math." These fonts harmonize with Palatino and Stone Serif pretty well (much better than the Computer Modern math fonts), even though they were designed for use with Lucida (which in my opinion beats out even Computer Modern for ugliness :-)). There is also a set of fonts done in Metafont by Hermann Zapf collectively called "Euler", which once again includes three math fonts, as well as some marvelously well done Fraktur fonts. -- Amanda Walker amanda@visix.com Visix Software Inc. ...!uunet!visix!amanda -- X Windows: It could be worse, but it'll take time...