On Thursday, October 26, 2000 10:28 AM, Corvin Russell [SMTP:corvinr@sympatico.ca] wrote:
Adrian and Kester and Akos, Kester, as for why questioning the default settings... Not sure about that, not sure about that. There are times when extended bold is desirable, but not every time. I find extended bold to be very ugly, unless there is a very specific reason for using it. I have been scanning my book and magazine collection, trying to find a nicely typeset book to use as an example. To my surprise, i couldn't find a nicely typeset book, except for some of my French books. I have a large book collection. Anyhow, it would surprise me to find much use of extended bold outside of display/advertising typesetting. When you combine the spindly, weightless Computer Modern
pindly? weightless? Sounds to me like you've been brought up on Times Roman - a font weighted to conteract excessively absorbant 19th century paper. It's much too dark and heavy for modern laser printers on modern paper, IMHO...
with a big fat extended bold header, to my mind it does not look good. I don't think the people who set the defaults are necessarily the world's best typesetters. Certainly cmr is not the world's most beautiful typeface.
cmr is part of the hallowed mf family, it is a very high quality font which scales correctly even at huge proportions, unlike tt and even type 1 fonts. Sure there is the times package for all to use, but I think it looks damn ugly when you can have the infinitely more elegant cmr by default. The only packages in fact which have tempted me are palatino and helvetica, the latter of which is nice for less formal ocassions. Most of the other standard 35 postscript fonts that you can use just aren't as nice. I don't dispute we need more fonts and packages adding to the basic teTex bundle, we definitely do.
As to the bold small caps, I was trying out setting the whole thing in cmr bold -- i have seen a book done this way -- in order to give some weight to the letters on the page. Hence my earlier question, though I know, in principle, that bold small caps should not be used -- howbeit they are supplied with most expert font packages. In the end I simply switched to Times, kept the latex defaults except for the extended bold -- I've used that in only two headers -- and now it looks boring but fine. I know the sc are faked in Times, since I don't yet have the expert font, but that doesn't bother me so much.
Kester: I am by no means whatsoever a typesetter, not even an amateur, but am aware of the multiple-font nightmares that can occur. A friend of mine produced a newsletter in Quark Xpress. I do believe every headline, every paragraph, was done in a different type.
Ah yes, amateurs at large, aesthetic sensabilities may be offended! But you can't deny folk their chance to do their own thing, which is kind of what the latex macros do, so I have a lot of sympathy with people who want latex to be less prescriptive and more flexible. And you only need to peruse the TeX catalogue / CTAN archives to see the many various academic institutions *.sty files that are offered, as it's a tad complex to change these things on your own. I still think that a decent front-end enabling new fonts to be installed and used in latex is desperately needed, even if only for those hobbiest amongst us daft enough to typeset pictures and text with latex! I'd love it if CTAN offered packages like 'RoosterHeavy' or 'Monotype Corsiva' which were everything you needed; scripts, fonts, afm / tfm files, etc, etc, and just let you unzip and install, and include the package name in the \usepackage{} declaration. That would make my life so much easier!! But I love latex for the sheer quality of its output, and 95% of the time I can forgive these shortcomings and the 'dive into sty files if you dare' type attitude! k.
-- Corvin Russell
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