[OS X TeX] MInion Pro - fullfamily problems

[Richard Seguin]

On Apr 28, 2012, at 4:57 PM, Richard Seguin wrote:

> 
> On Apr 28, 2012, at 3:00 PM, Michael Sharpe wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Apr 28, 2012, at 9:41 AM, Richard Seguin wrote:
>> 
>>> Michael,
>>> 
>>> I decided to complete the Minion Pro family by obtaining the medium weight, giving me all four weights, for use with LaTeX and Pages. I tested the new version of TeXFontUtility by uninstalling Minion Pro and reinstalling with all four weights. That went smoothly, and I got the correct encoding files this time.
>>> 
>>> I'm scratching my head again though, this time wondering how to access the medium weight in LaTeX. When I was using medfamily, I was using one of two techniques for accessing all of regular, semibold, and bold:
>>> 
>>> \renewcommand*{\bfdefault}{eb}  
>>> \def\semib#1{{\fontseries{sb}\selectfont #1}}
>>> 
>>> or 
>>> 
>>> \def\ebold#1{{\fontseries{eb}\selectfont #1}}
>>> 
>>> Now, if I try, for example,
>>> 
>>> \renewcommand*{\bfdefault}{eb}  
>>> \def\semib#1{{\fontseries{sb}\selectfont #1}}
>>> \def\medw#1{{\fontseries{m}\selectfont #1}}
>>> 
>>> \medw{ } has no effect, i.e., A and \medw{A} typeset at the same (regular) weight. (Interestingly, I can use any text string for the series, i.e. \def\medw#1{{\fontseries{xyz}\selectfont #1}}, and I get no error --- it still typesets at regular weight.)
>>> 
>>> Actually, I'm not even certain that \fontseries{m} even refers to the medium weight family.
>>> 
>>> Any ideas? Anyone?
>> 
>> As far as I can tell, the MinionPro support files contain virtual fonts for the Medium weight, but the fd files have no support for them. You can  extend them yourself on an as-needed basis by doing something like the following
>> 
>> \usepackage{article}
>> \usepackage{tracefnt}% so you can see what's being loaded
>> %SetFonts
>> % Minion Pro+MnSymbol
>> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
>> \usepackage[lf]{MinionPro}% MinionPro-LF is FontFamily used for text
>> % extend its .fd by adding mediumbold (mb) in two shapes
>> \DeclareFontShape{T1}{MinionPro-LF}{mb}{n}{
>> <-> MinionPro-Medium-lf-t1
>> }{}
>> \DeclareFontShape{T1}{MinionPro-LF}{mb}{it}{
>> <-> MinionPro-MediumIt-lf-t1
>> }{}
>> %
>> \def\medw#1{{\fontseries{mb}\selectfont #1}}
>> %SetFonts
>> \begin{document}
>> 
>> \medw{Abc}. \emph{Normal italic, \medw{a little bolder}}.
>> 
>> \end{document}  
>> 
>> Michael
> 
> Michael,
> 
> Thanks! That works perfectly! 
> 
> I pretty much concluded the same thing myself looking at MInionPro-FontDef.sty. I don't understand all those lower level commands, but I could sort of guess what was going on. It's a little odd that they never went a tiny extra step to enable the medium weights despite loading them, but it's just a few lines of extra code now in my .tex file. Hopefully better medium weight support will be included in the next release. I'm starting to accumulate enough bits of example special code in the course of this project that I should be able to start figuring some of this stuff out for myself.
> 
> I thought that the medium weight might be nice for some large titles and for subtle emphasis in normal text. I'll be playing with that later tonight.
> 
> Richard

Just as I suspected, the medium weight is perfect for my \huge document title and chapter titles. I don't like large/heavy titles because they tend to "shout" like an email done with all capitals. The medium weight gives the characters a little extra "snap" without adding chunkiness. I'm using semibold for \Large section headers, and now the chapter titles and section headers look in visual balance by weight. Since I'm using the

\renewcommand*{\bfdefault}{eb}  
\def\semib#1{{\fontseries{sb}\selectfont #1}}

combination, the Theorem, Lemma, etc., \normalsize headers within sections come out in bold by default, and these look in balance with the semibold section headers. Within normal text I'm using semibold to highlight words I'm defining or section or chapter names that I refer to. It's just soft enough that it doesn't look too distracting or discontinuous within the text. Everything is in balance, and I'm very happy with this.

Richard