Emerald fonts - font size?

[Stroller]

Hi there,

I've installed the Emerald fonts [1] from CTAN, and have got them working on
my system. An example such as the LaTeX Font catalogue's text example [2]
works perfectly, but I can't work out for the life of me how to resize the
font.

I'm using this in the context of:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{emerald}
\fontfamily{cmss}\fontsize{12pt}{13pt}\selectfont
Here's the body of my text
{\ECFAugie Some notes in the magin}
Body text continues...
\end{document}

I wish to use cmss as my default font and Augie enclosed in a group only for
short notes. Yet {\ECFAugie \fontsize(10pt) doesn't work as I'd hope}

Thanks in advance for any pointers,

Stroller.



[1] http://ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/emerald/
[2] http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/augie/augie.tex

[Ulrike Fischer]

Post by Stroller
Hi there,
I've installed the Emerald fonts [1] from CTAN, and have got them
working on my system. An example such as the LaTeX Font catalogue's
text example [2] works perfectly, but I can't work out for the life of
me how to resize the font.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{emerald}
\fontfamily{cmss}\fontsize{12pt}{13pt}\selectfont
Here's the body of my text
{\ECFAugie Some notes in the magin}
Body text continues...
\end{document}
I wish to use cmss as my default font and Augie enclosed in a group
only for short notes. Yet {\ECFAugie \fontsize(10pt) doesn't work as
I'd hope}

If you had compared \fontsize(10pt) to the font commands you used above
you could perhaps get an idea what's wrong and what's missing. In any
way: if is not a good idea to set the default fontfamily and fontsize
with a \selectfont command.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{emerald}
\renewcommand\familydefault{\sfdefault}
\begin{document}
Here's the body of my text
{\ECFAugie\small Some \footnotesize notes \tiny in the magin}
Body text continues...
\end{document}

[Stroller]

Post by Ulrike Fischer
...

Post by Stroller
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{emerald}
\fontfamily{cmss}\fontsize{12pt}{13pt}\selectfont

...
If you had compared \fontsize(10pt) to the font commands you used above
you could perhaps get an idea what's wrong and what's missing.

I wonder if I really used \fontsize(10pt) or \fontsize{10pt} - I'm afraid it
was very late when I posted last night. I guess that you may be referring to
the "\selectfont" command, however LaTeX's syntax is in no way clear to me.

Post by Ulrike Fischer
In any
way: if is not a good idea to set the default fontfamily and fontsize
with a \selectfont command.

Could I possibly trouble you to explain why, please?

I'm afraid I have only been using LaTeX for a few days, and have been spurred
to do so by a need to modify an invoice template in SQL-Ledger.

In SQL-Ledger all the LaTeX templates contain this declatation:
\fontfamily{cmss}\fontsize{10pt}{12pt}\selectfont

I'm afraid I was unable to find any reference to fontfamily in either the
Indian TeX Uers Group "LaTeX Tutorials - A Primer" or "The Not So Short
Introduction To LaTeX". I'm afraid I have stuck with this line because it
continued to work - unlike some of my experiments with other usages!!

Post by Ulrike Fischer
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{emerald}
\renewcommand\familydefault{\sfdefault}
\begin{document}
Here's the body of my text
{\ECFAugie\small Some \footnotesize notes \tiny in the magin}
Body text continues...
\end{document}

Many thanks for this. The \small size of Augie is the one I'd like to use
thoughout the document. I'm sure it must be possible to make this a default
"scaling" of the font. This would save me setting \small for every occurrence
of Augie - does anyone have any quick pointers on how to do this?
See for a graphical explanation:
http://stuff.stroller.uk.eu.org/LaTeX_Augie.pdf

Stroller.

[Ulrike Fischer]

Post by Stroller

Post by Ulrike Fischer
If you had compared \fontsize(10pt) to the font commands you used
above you could perhaps get an idea what's wrong and what's missing.

I wonder if I really used \fontsize(10pt) or \fontsize{10pt} - I'm
afraid it was very late when I posted last night. I guess that you may
be referring to the "\selectfont" command, however LaTeX's syntax is
in no way clear to me.

\fontsize has two argument (the fontsize and the baselineskip) and yes
you also need a \selectfont after the command (either implicitly or
explicitly).

Post by Stroller

Post by Ulrike Fischer
In any way: if is not a good idea to set the default fontfamily and
fontsize with a \selectfont command.

Could I possibly trouble you to explain why, please?

Because at quite a lot of place (e.g. headers) LaTeX inserts a
"\normalfont" command which will not give your wanted default font

Post by Stroller

Post by Ulrike Fischer
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{emerald}
\renewcommand\familydefault{\sfdefault}
\begin{document}
Here's the body of my text
{\ECFAugie\small Some \footnotesize notes \tiny in the magin}
Body text continues...
\end{document}

Many thanks for this. The \small size of Augie is the one I'd like to
use thoughout the document. I'm sure it must be possible to make this
a default "scaling" of the font. This would save me setting \small for
every occurrence of Augie - does anyone have any quick pointers on how
to do this?

You can put a scaling factor in the fd-files. Or define a command
\newcommand\smallaugie{\ECFAugie\small}

[mcesar]

Post by Stroller
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{emerald}
\fontfamily{cmss}\fontsize{12pt}{13pt}\selectfont
Here's the body of my text
{\ECFAugie Some notes in the magin}
Body text continues...
\end{document}

The "hard" way is:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{emerald}
\begin{document}
\fontfamily{cmss}\fontsize{12pt}{13pt}\selectfont
Here's the body of my text
{\ECFAugie\fontsize{10pt}{13pt}\selectfont Some notes in the margin}
Body text continues...
\end{document}

note that you have missed the 2nd parameter to \fontsize and also the
\selectfont. You can also put the \fontsize command prior to \ECFAugie and
then \selectfont it is not necessary (as \ECFAugie includes it). If you
change the \fontsize by \small, \tiny and the like it works OK without
\selectfont. Ulrike Fisches has given us a good example of it.

When writing this package I assumed that the emerald fonts will not
be used as the "main" fonts of a document (imagine your PhD Thesis witten
with Skeetch :-) so I decided to provide these commands (\ECF...) to change
locally to a given font, and do not include them in the \familydefault,
\rmdefault... mechanism. I apologize if this causes confussion or trouble.

In any way, I'm happy to know that my work is useful for somebody
:-) Regards.

[Stroller]

Post by mcesar
...
note that you have missed the 2nd parameter to \fontsize and also the
\selectfont. You can also put the \fontsize command prior to \ECFAugie and
then \selectfont it is not necessary (as \ECFAugie includes it).

I see. Thank you very much for your help.

Post by mcesar
When writing this package I assumed that the emerald fonts will not
be used as the "main" fonts of a document (imagine your PhD Thesis witten
with Skeetch :-) so I decided to provide these commands (\ECF...) to change
locally to a given font, and do not include them in the \familydefault,
\rmdefault... mechanism. I apologize if this causes confussion or trouble.

I'm afraid that - to someone as inexperienced as I - your explanation causes
as much confusion. In learning LaTeX I'm finding its syntax to be almost akin
to a programming language... it certainly appears to try to follow logical
rules. I don't understand, therefore, why two fonts should be treated
differently.

As a teenager I used to have a couple of volumes from an illustrated series
upon fishing that were either hand-printed or entirely set in a "handwritten
font". Surely such a font might be difficult to read if used for a 500 page
novel, but in this book it worked extremely well - each page featured one or
more pieces of line-art (a species of fish, a lure or a reel) and perhaps only
3 or 4 paragraphs. I could now no longer tell you the titles or publisher, but
that I remember these books after so many years suggests that they may well
have been both beautiful & readable.

I am not saying that these fonts should be used universally for large
documents, merely that perhaps one shouldn't make assumptions? Pookie looks to
me like the sort of font that might grace an early Offspring album and in
sleeve notes the very fact that Movieola is slightly hard to read, requiring
the reader's concentration, might be seen as a tool to help draw the reader
into the lyrics, were it used extensively for their typesetting.

Post by mcesar
In any way, I'm happy to know that my work is useful for somebody

It is indeed VERY useful. I am clearly not the intended audience for
scientific papers, so it would be unfair of me to judge their content, however
I find their use only of a serif Times font and a standard layout - standard
not throughout each document, but for ALL scientific papers - to be quite
boring.

I am sure that the word-processor I used 20 years or so ago on the BBC Micro
[1] was not WYSIWYG, but used similar macros to those of LaTeX to output bold
or italic text to a dot-matrix printer. For general usage this was in many
ways far superior to current versions of Word, which tempts little old ladies
to indent paragraphs using the spacebar. I do not think I could reccomend
LaTeX to such users right now, but a wider range of fonts certainly makes
LaTeX more accessable & useful to users outside of academia.

I would encourage anyone writing a webpage on LaTeX to mention The LaTeX Font
Catalogue at http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/ - it was only after a number of
hours of searching through pages related to fonts in LaTeX that I _happened_
to _stumble_ upon this resource, and it is invaluable to users like me. I have
no desire to use Comic Sans and I don't need to change fonts in my documents
often - philosophically I find LaTeX's ideal of defining document style
separately from the document text extremely logical - but I had been finding
LaTeX quite limiting until finding that site. I would find a font on CTAN and
end up quite frustrated by finding it unsuitable ONLY after I'd installed it
on my system & configured updmap.cfg. It is quite illogical to me how the
first thing one find when looking for truetype fonts is an image of how the
font acrually looks, yet for LaTeX this appears widely to be considered
unnecessary.

These comments should be in no way be considered a critisism of you - I merely
feel compelled to mention my thoughts now that I have found someone to discuss
them with. I am extremely grateful to you for making such useful display fonts
available under LaTeX.

Stroller.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bbc_micro

[mcesar]

On Tue, 07 Nov 2006 01:02:59 +0000, Stroller <***@bigfoot.com> wrote:

The commands \ECFAugie and the like are supossed to be helpful when
switching to these fonts locally, but if you wanna use the emerald fonts as
"normal" fonts then you must use the "normal" LaTeX font commands. This way,
if you say (in the preamble of the document):

\renewcommand\familydefault{fau}

or

\renewcommand\rmdefault{fau}

then Augie will be used as the main serif font of the document (substituting
cmr). If you say \renewcommand\sfdefault{fau} then Augie will be used
instead of the sans font (cmss). This mechanism is explained in "The LaTeX
companion", a must for any LaTeX user, so I decided not to mention it on the
emerald package documentation (perhaps a bad decission). If you use this
mechanism you do not need to load the package emerald (which only serves to
define the \ECF... commands). The strinf "fau" designates the font family
you want use, the documentation of the emerald package lists the available
font families.

You must also consider that some of the emerald fonts cannot be used
as normal fonts because they lack a high number of gliphs. This is another
reason because I opted for these special commands.

Regards.