[XeTeX] Change Math font

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Sat Mar 15 14:12:40 CET 2008


Le 15 mars 08 à 13:00, Sven Siegmund a écrit :

> I will be keep an eye on that changed math font. If it
> will couse some trouble, I'll change it back.

Actually, the situation is worse than I thought. The "letters" math  
alphabet is used not only for roman letters and digits, but also for  
Greek letters, while the "symbols" alphabet is for mathematical signs  
only (like \in, \gg, \ll). You can check this by looking at all the  
\DeclareMathSymbol instructions in \MiKTeX\tex\latex\base\fontmath.ltx.

Accordingly, with the suggested redefinition, Greek letters will stop  
working in math.

Appended is output of \MiKTeX\tex\latex\base\nfssfont.tex when used to  
produce character tables for "Adobe Garamond Pro/I" (what you get with  
the redefinition) and cmmi10 (what LaTeX is designed to use). You can  
see the use differences in glyph content and placement.

What's normally done in the LaTeX community for getting math fonts  
tailored to a specific text font family is create specific math fonts  
manually by the virtual font mechanism. An example is the mathptmx  
package which, to accompany the Times text font, creates math fonts  
combining glyphs from TimesI, Symbol and cmmi. There are many such  
packages, fontspec.sty seems to contain a list of some of them:

anttor
arev
eulervm
mathdesign
concmath
cmbright
mathesf
gfsartemisia
gfsneohellenic
iwona
kpfonts
kmath
kurier
fouriernc
fourier
mathpazo
mathptmx
MinionPro

I think there are also the txfonts and some other similar fonts, but  
I've not used them myself.

What's probably advisable in your case is try loading one of these  
packages before fontspec, and find in this way a math font blending  
well with Adobe Garamond Pro. I can't provide more specific help here,  
not being a Garamond user myself. You might try cmbright or fourier  
(originally designed to accompany Utopia), maybe.

In the long run, Unicode math fonts should be produced to accompany  
Unicode text fonts. Will Robertson, the author of fontspec, has a  
unicode-math package in the works, but it's not yet ready for prime  
time until the STIX fonts, a Unicode math font set designed to  
accompany Times, is officially released.

Bruno

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