Issue 2006-1 is the first issue of the PracTeX Journal's
second year. For this issue we tried announcing a "fonts"
theme
and were pleasantly surprised at the number of
high-quality articles received. Many who use TeX have
probably never used anything beyond the default fonts, while some
may have tried \usepackage{times} but may not have
tried \usepackage{palatino}. Hopefully, after
perusing the articles in this issue, you will become more
comfortable using new
fonts and techniques.
The lead off article is Typographic
Opportunities by Tamye Riggs of SOTA (Society of Typographic
Aficionados). She gives an overview of the world of digital type,
offers some tips for beginning and experienced users, and lists
numerous resources. We contacted Tamye to provide an article and a
font quiz, and she and her colleagues at SOTA provided everything we
asked for and more — for the font quiz they even donated a
valuable prize. If you would like to know more about type
and type design, consider joining SOTA or attending the TypeCon conference, to be held this
summer in Boston.
We are fortunate to have an article on LaTeX font usage by Walter Schmidt, who
has been a major contributor to the TeX community in the area
of fonts. In
this article he answers some frequently-asked font
questions, such as how to use the basic font selection
commands and how to change the default fonts for a document.
Gerben C. Th. Wierda, Thomas A. Schmitz and Adam T. Lindsay
describe font usage in Mac OS X Fonts in
pdfTeX. This article decribes automated font
installation with a Mac-based TeX system, but their techniques
apply to other host systems as well. (Also see previous
font-related articles by Schmitz
and Lindsay.)
In Michael Spivak's The
MathTimeProfessional Fonts we learn
about the events and requirements that led this mathematician and math publisher to design the popular
MathTime Professional fonts. Those who have read his
beautifully typeset books or used his fonts for their own
publications will be curious to know how and why he became a font
designer. He concludes
his article wistfully hoping this is the end of the font design
era in his life, but I suspect he will be back with new designs
in coming years.
Will Robertson writes about the relatively new set of Latin Modern fonts, a large collection of
fonts for typesetting documents in many languages. The creators
of these fonts, Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz M. Nowacki, intend
this font collection to be the successor to Donald Knuth's Computer Modern fonts.
For those who need to use Asian fonts in their documents
Helmer Aslaksen describes Using the CJK
LaTeX Package, including how to install it, how to enter
text, and other nuances of this package. The CJK (Chinese, Japanese,
Korean) package, developed by Werner Lemberg, is widely used and
this article provides a useful introduction to it, with several
sample documents.
Stephen Hartke's Survey of Free Math
Fonts shows numerous math font examples, showing how various math
and text fonts combine in the same document. He shows where you can obtain the
fonts and how to use them.
David Walden's popular Travels in TeX
Land column describes his experiences buying, installing,
and beginning to use the Lucida fonts. A good read for those who
are "font shy", as David admits he was before writing this piece.
Ask Nelly answers some commonly-asked
questions about TeX font usage.
And finally, for those who
like puzzles and challenges, Distractions
offers a few font quizzes with valuable prizes including
fonts, books, and CDs. You can also read about the winners of last
issue's Sudoku contests and see their solutions, including two TeX-based
sudoku solvers!
PracTeX Journal readers provided insightful feedback. As you read the articles and columns
please use the response links to send comments. If you use a technique
from an article or column, be sure to contact the author and report
how it worked for you. The PracTeX Journal is still evolving
and your feedback will help us as we strive to improve it.
