[OS X TeX] Font size in tetex and/or TexShop

[Jérôme Laurens]

Le 20 juil. 04, à 05:10, Sylvan Jacques a écrit :

> I have just started learning Latex, and my first modification
> failed. I ran
> ==========
> \documentclass[14pt]{article}
> \begin{document}
>
>      Hello World.
>
> \end{document}
> ===========
> LaTeX Warning: Unused global option(s):  [14pt].
> ======
> If I change 14pt to 12pt, it seems to run ok, and the log file has
>
> (/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/latex/base/article.cls
> Document Class: article 2001/04/21 v1.4e Standard LaTeX document class
> (/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/latex/base/size12.clo
> File: size12.clo 2001/04/21 v1.4e Standard LaTeX file (size option))
>
> but the output is the same as the default 10pt size which I get
> when I omit the font size.
>
> BTW, I use tetex and/or TexShop and pdfLatex to get pdf output.
>
> How do I adjust the font?
>
> I am running tetex on Mac OS 10.2.8 with TeXShop--all very recent
> versions.
>
>

Welcome to the dark side of the force,

your question is not specifically related to TeXShop nor Mac but to 
LaTeX which is (fortunately) not TeXShop nor Mac  dependent.
In that case you should not mention the frontend in the title.
Moreover as it is not Mac specific, you can also ask any 
list/group/google you want.

Don't believe people that let you think that TeXShop will ease the 
learning of LaTeX.
Download doc, tutorials and read them carefully.
To become a LaTeX user, you will have to think different,
but as a Mac user, you already think different...

In addition to what Bob said:

Your suggestion to use the \documentclass[14pt]{article} to enlarge the 
font size is very natural.
As a document wide option you should expect an increase of the size all 
the fonts used in the document.
Unfortunately, LaTeX only knows about 10pt, 11pt, 12pt which are built 
in options,
each of them causes the loading of a file named sizeXX.clo.
But 14pt is not a known built in option, so the log informs you that it 
is simply ignored, and LaTeX uses instead the default one: 10pt.
Some people extended this size management to include 7pt, 8pt, 9pt, 
14pt, 17pt, 20pt, see google and more precisely
<http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/extsizes/>.
You must use an extended article class that knows about all these 
options.

The question is now "why are things so difficult?"
I think this is due to the original design of fonts that were not 
scalable.
Remember that LaTeX was designed in the last century...
Moreover, a somehow cool LaTeX would parse the given options to match a 
XXpt and then load the appropriate sizeXX.clo,
whatever XX can be. Despite it is perfectly feasable (by TeX gurus I 
mean), I guess this is certainly time consuming and we do not have 
enough computing power to waste time for that.

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