LaTeX-Beamer fonts

[Yelnick McWahWah]

Well, I'm trying to determine a good font to use for presentations with
Beamer. The problem is that I want my math to look good. Since it seems
that Beamer wants to use Sans Serif fonts, it seems that I'm looking for a
free Sans Serif font that makes my math look good.

It really defeats the purpose of using Sans Serif if it goes back to
normal Computer Modern Roman for mathematics. Therefore, the best
solution that I've found right now it to just use Computer Modern Roman
for the text and Computer Modern (as well) for the math. The Computer
Moder Sans Serif doesn't do well with the math.

If anyone here has any suggestions on a good Sans Serif font (since
presentations are most commonly done in Sans Serif fonts), I'd love to
hear it.

[Bob Tennent]

Post by Yelnick McWahWah
I'm looking for a
free Sans Serif font that makes my math look good.

It's not free but Optima is a very nice Zapf-designed sans-serif face:
the strokes are tapered (unlike most sans-serif faces like Helvetica),
giving a lively effect. Sansmath works well with Optima. You may be
able to find a good-enough clone like Zapf Humanist on font CDs but
even the real thing (from Linotype) is relatively inexpensive: you can
get by with only two fonts because artificial slanting works well with
sans-serif faces.

Bob T.

[Yelnick McWahWah]

Bob,

You're gonna have to excuse my ignorance on font lingo, but what does this
mean toward math results? That is, how does this make the math look?
Since I'm a mathematician, I'm more interested in my math looking good
than I am my plain text.

[Walter Schmidt]

Post by Yelnick McWahWah
I'm more interested in my math looking good
than I am my plain text.

You need a comprehensive family of matching sans-serif
text and math fonts. There exist two alternatives:

1) HV-Math, a commercial product from MicroPress Inc,
see <http://www.micropress-inc.com/fonts>

2) The CM-Bright fonts which are, most likely, part
of your TeX system. Just try \usepackage{cmbright}.
In Metafont format, these fonts are free;
In PostScript-Type1 format, they are available as a
commercial product from MicroPress (see above).
Recently a number of CM-Bright were made available
freely from CTAN also in Type1-Format, but I don't
know whether this covers already the full set.

Since you mentioned primarily beamer presentations,
I suspect that CM-Bright may be too light (thin)
for your needs; after all, these fonts were primarily
designed for use in print.


If you like neither the one nor the other, you need
to find different font familes for text and math,
which blend sufficiently well. Notice that the text
font is to be used also in math, particularly for
operator names such as \sin and \log, and for
physical units.

The Euler math fonts (eulervm.sty) may be suitable for
this purpose (even though they are loking a bit strange
;-). As the text font, I'd suggest "Syntax" (commercial,
from Adobe or Linotype). Optima, too, looks fine
but is too close to Euler(*) so that this combination
does not work well -- but YMMV. CM-Sans does, IMO,
not blend well with Euler at all.

(* This is not surprising, since both font familes
were desigend by H.Zapf.)

In any case, don't waste your time with primitive
stop-gap-solutions such as using Helvetica for text
and CM-Math for the formulas -- this is like shouting
out loud "I'm a bloody amateur".


just my 2c
Walter

[Bob Tennent]

Post by Yelnick McWahWah
You're gonna have to excuse my ignorance on font lingo, but what does this
mean toward math results? That is, how does this make the math look?
Since I'm a mathematician, I'm more interested in my math looking good
than I am my plain text.

If you use sansmath, you'll get oblique sans-serif variables which match
your text but the math operators are taken from the Computer Modern math
fonts. It's a compromise to be sure but good enough for presentations.
If you send me your real e-mail address, I'll send you a sample pdf
using Optima and sansmath.

Bob T.

[Yelnick McWahWah]

Bob,

My real name is Troy Henderson and my email address is
***@math.tamu.edu

Thanks,

Troy

[Rolf Niepraschk]

Post by Yelnick McWahWah
Well, I'm trying to determine a good font to use for presentations with
Beamer. The problem is that I want my math to look good. Since it seems
that Beamer wants to use Sans Serif fonts, it seems that I'm looking for a
free Sans Serif font that makes my math look good.
It really defeats the purpose of using Sans Serif if it goes back to
normal Computer Modern Roman for mathematics. Therefore, the best
solution that I've found right now it to just use Computer Modern Roman
for the text and Computer Modern (as well) for the math. The Computer
Moder Sans Serif doesn't do well with the math.
If anyone here has any suggestions on a good Sans Serif font (since
presentations are most commonly done in Sans Serif fonts), I'd love to
hear it.

Look at the LaTeX package `tpslifonts'

...Rolf

[Ki-Joo Kim]

Post by Yelnick McWahWah
Well, I'm trying to determine a good font to use for presentations with
Beamer. The problem is that I want my math to look good. Since it seems
that Beamer wants to use Sans Serif fonts, it seems that I'm looking for a
free Sans Serif font that makes my math look good.
It really defeats the purpose of using Sans Serif if it goes back to
normal Computer Modern Roman for mathematics. Therefore, the best
solution that I've found right now it to just use Computer Modern Roman
for the text and Computer Modern (as well) for the math. The Computer
Moder Sans Serif doesn't do well with the math.
If anyone here has any suggestions on a good Sans Serif font (since
presentations are most commonly done in Sans Serif fonts), I'd love to
hear it.

I tested serveral free text and math* fonts with beamer. You can see
the file from http://faq.ktug.or.kr/wiki/uploads/MathFonts.pdf

* Some of them are Beamer's simulated math expression (like sansmath package).

Ki-Joo

[Yelnick McWahWah]

Ki-Joo,

Post by Ki-Joo Kim
I tested serveral free text and math* fonts with beamer. You can see
the file from http://faq.ktug.or.kr/wiki/uploads/MathFonts.pdf

Thanks for the sample. I really like the one you call "Concrete - Euler
VM (1)". To me it kinda resembles a "bold" CM. Anyway, when I use the
preamble commands that you provide and run `pdflatex` on my .tex file, I
get the following

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Warning: pdflatex (file eoti10): Font eoti10 at 864 not found

Warning: pdflatex (file eorm10): Font eorm10 at 600 not found
</var/lib/texmf/pk/ljfour/jknappen/ec/ecbx0800.600pk>
Warning: pdflatex (file eorm10): Font eorm10 at 864 not found

Warning: pdflatex (file eorm10): Font eorm10 at 1244 not found
</var/lib/texmf/pk/ljfour/jknappen/ec/ecbx0600.600pk>
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

I'm running teTeX on Fedora Core 2 (Linux). Are there any additional
files that I have to download (and install) in order to make this work?

Thanks!

[Ki-Joo Kim]

Post by Yelnick McWahWah
Ki-Joo,

Post by Ki-Joo Kim
I tested serveral free text and math* fonts with beamer. You can see
the file from http://faq.ktug.or.kr/wiki/uploads/MathFonts.pdf

Thanks for the sample. I really like the one you call "Concrete - Euler
VM (1)". To me it kinda resembles a "bold" CM. Anyway, when I use the
preamble commands that you provide and run `pdflatex` on my .tex file, I
get the following
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Warning: pdflatex (file eoti10): Font eoti10 at 864 not found
Warning: pdflatex (file eorm10): Font eorm10 at 600 not found
</var/lib/texmf/pk/ljfour/jknappen/ec/ecbx0800.600pk>
Warning: pdflatex (file eorm10): Font eorm10 at 864 not found
Warning: pdflatex (file eorm10): Font eorm10 at 1244 not found
</var/lib/texmf/pk/ljfour/jknappen/ec/ecbx0600.600pk>
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
I'm running teTeX on Fedora Core 2 (Linux). Are there any additional
files that I have to download (and install) in order to make this work?
Thanks!

I am using MikTeX-2.3 full installation. I guess Concrete font is one
of the TeX's core fonts. "eorm" is European Concrete font (with
additional accents?). From your warning messages, pdflatex is calling
PK fonts, not the Type 1 fonts.
Could you run the following source and check the font?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Required!
\usepackage{concrete}
\begin{document}
Hello
\end{document}

[Yelnick McWahWah]

I had to download cm-super fonts and install them for it to work. The
results look great (IMHO).

[Mark Rutten]

Post by Yelnick McWahWah
Well, I'm trying to determine a good font to use for presentations with
Beamer. The problem is that I want my math to look good. Since it seems
that Beamer wants to use Sans Serif fonts, it seems that I'm looking for a
free Sans Serif font that makes my math look good.

I had the same trouble a while ago and created some scripts to make up
virtual fonts using a combination of helvetica condensed for the text
and (truetype converted to tyep42) arial narrow for the greek math
glyphs. You can see the results and download the scripts to make the
fonts yourself here: http://users.chariot.net.au/~marknai/mathman/.

I'm not a font guru, but the results looked OK to me. Arial narrow
was our corporate font for a while, which is why I used that, but you
could easily convert the scripts to use standard helvetica and arial
instead.

Mark.