Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ Upright greek fonts

[cbkschroeder]

Hi!

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.

So I'm probably not the only person that's had trouble with upright greek fonts in latex from what I've seen in my own investigations. My problem revolves around an upright mu. I think I've explored and struggled (for some time) with almost every package that attempts to do something about this issue that's out there, and I'm still not convinced I've solved my problem.

At this point, what I'd love to do is use the \textmu from the textcomp package in my document. I put \usepackage{textcomp} in my preamble, and everything works out great. The mu appears in the .dvi document and it matches the default latex font and I'm happy. Then, however, I use dvipdfm to convert the document to a .pdf and look closely at the mu and it looks - unlike its surrounding companions characters - like an ugly bitmapped "thing." It's definately my mu, but it's terrible looking now. What went wrong? The same happens if I use pdflatex to generate a .pdf file directly.

I would absolutely, positively love if someone could help me out with this. I should add, for the moment I'm using a trick I picked up from some kind person somewhere to get a mu that's at least a little different that the default scripty looking mu:

\DeclareFontFamily{U}{euc}{}% I chose euc because the chart is called Euler cursive
\DeclareFontShape{U}{euc}{m}{n}{<-6>eurm5<6-8>eurm7<8->eurm10}{}%
\DeclareSymbolFont{AMSc}{U}{euc}{m}{n} % I chose AMSc because AMSa and AMSb are defined in the amsfonts-package
\DeclareMathSymbol{\umu}{\mathord}{AMSc}{"16}

I'd be lying if I told you I knew what any of that meant, but it seems to give me something different. The mu I get from this is *not* an ugly bitmapped thing, it just doesn't seem to match the default latex font well like the textcomp mu would.

I realize I'm being fussy, but I'd like to figure this out. If anyone could give me some advice here, I'd be deeply appreciative.

Thanks!

[phi]

Probably you don't use the Latin Modern fonts, in that case textcomp uses a bitmap version of the symbol. Use the following packages (preferably in the same order):

Code: Select all

\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

You can check which fonts are used in Acrobat Reader with File → Properties → Fonts. No fonts marked as "Type 3" should appear there. Most "good" TeX fonts use Type 1.

[cbkschroeder]

This has helped me *so* much. I'm profoundly thankful!

I should ask a question. Simply using \usepackage{lmodern} and \usepackage{textcomp} solved the problem. I didn't even use the third line.

In the past, when I used that third line, it seemed the everything became a bitmap font, regardless of whether I seemed to be viewing in yap or pdf. Any idea why that happened? All my fonts were ugly and blocky.

Again, thanks very much. I really appreciate it!

Christian

[phi]

In the past, when I used that third line, it seemed the everything became a bitmap font, regardless of whether I seemed to be viewing in yap or pdf. Any idea why that happened? All my fonts were ugly and blocky.

The reason for this lies in how TeX handles fonts. The fontenc package selects a certain font encoding—the default being OT1. This is the original encoding created by Knuth, which lacks many important characters, in particular accented characters found in nearly every Latin-based script except English. To resolve this, other encodings were created, most notably T1, which contains these accented characters, and TS1, which encompasses the textcomp characters like \textmu. But the encoding is only one part of the story—there has to be a real font that supports the encoding. The standard Computer Modern fonts are written in the font description language Metafont and were intended to be converted to several bitmap versions for different output resolutions. This was a good choice in the seventies when the computers were much slower and no good font rendering libraries were available and only a small set of resolutions were in common usage. If one were to create a document for a 150 dpi printer, one would use a bitmap font suited for 150 dpi printers—there were no PDF viewers allowing arbitrary zoom levels. But today the situation is entirely different: We have sophisticated font rendering libraries that can typeset glyphs at every conceivable resolution on the fly. So what we want to have is TrueType or PostScript versions of the Computer Modern fonts. Unfortunately, this is not an easy task. MetaFont is a complex language that doesn't allow for a simple transformation to a quadratic or cubic Bézier spline used in modern outline fonts. The best thing we can do at the moment is rendering the MetaFont descriptions at a very high resolutions and use a tracing program (potrace, mftrace...) to approximate the outlines by splines. But in many cases, manual corrections and optimizations are required after this process, which is hard work. Since LaTeX is not commercial software, there is no big company that could pay for this work, thus we have to rely on volunteers. The current standard PostScript versions of Computer Modern were created by the company BlueSky long time ago and subsequently released to the general public. These are the fonts that most LaTeX documents use today. Unfortunately, they only cover the OT1 encoding. So if you request the T1 encoding by loading the fontenc package with the T1 option, the driver will invoke MetaFont to create bitmap versions of the fonts, like in the seventies. (In contrast to then, this gets done on the fly and the results are being cached.) To get outline fonts in our PDF documents, we thusly need real PostScript versions that contain the characters of the T1 and TS1 encodings. Nearly every contemporary font does this, but very few are usable in LaTeX because TeX needs additional font metric files and encoding vectors. Especially mathematics typesetting is hard to achieve. So either one uses other PostScript (or TrueType/OpenType) fonts—this is particularly of interest when math typesetting is not an issue—or tries to create PostScript versions of the Computer Modern font covering all characters of the aforementioned encodings. There are two famous approaches to the latter option: The cm-super fonts by Vladimir Volovich, which were created purely automatically, and the Latin Modern fonts by Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz Nowacki, which aim for good typographical standards. The Latin Modern fonts are very similar and mostly compatible with the Computer Modern fonts, but not entirely identical, so they are not used by default if installed (in contrast to the cm-super fonts), but have to be activated by including the lmodern package.

[cbkschroeder]

A nice, clear explanation; thanks!

I remember the good old days when I first started to use latex - it was around 1992. I used it on my Amiga, and whenever it was time to render fonts, well, it was time to go and get a coffee, too!

Things are a lot clearer now - and the document looks great.

Looking through the package manager on my MikTeX installation, I notice that there is a cm-super package which can be installed. It seems in your explanation that you feel lmodern is somehow better ("better typographical standards" I think you said) than the cm-super fonts. Are the latter worth trying? What's the difference? Also, you seem to imply that cm-super fonts, when installed, will thereafter be used by default unless I call the lmodern family explicitly; is his correct? Can you think of a reason why a user might not want cm-super?

Thanks again for all the clarification; I'm learning a lot!

Cheers,

Christian

[phi]

It seems in your explanation that you feel lmodern is somehow better ("better typographical standards" I think you said) than the cm-super fonts.

I'm not an expert in typography, but I've read that the cm-super fonts were created by a tool without human interaction, while lmodern was designed by typographers. Personally, I don't see a difference (except for the design of the ß ligature), but someone with more experience could for sure tell which font is better. There is some information in the Font Installation Guide and in the article How less means more, but both documents are several years old. There are some other articles linked on the homepage of the lmodern fonts where the authors give some reasons for creating the lmodern fonts.

Are the latter worth trying? What's the difference?

As I said before, the lmodern fonts have the explicit goal of good quality, while cm-super just wants to provide a collection of PostScript Computer Modern fonts in every possible design size and style combination.

Also, you seem to imply that cm-super fonts, when installed, will thereafter be used by default unless I call the lmodern family explicitly; is his correct?

Yes, if you request T1 or another supported font encoding. See the cm-super FAQ on CTAN for details.

Can you think of a reason why a user might not want cm-super?

Perhaps because of typographic quality, perhaps because they are much bigger than BlueSky's CM fonts.

[cbkschroeder]

Very cool; thanks!

Christian