columbus: 13 of 20
Beautiful text faces are released each
year. Some of these survive and prosper, basking in their uniqueness
and usefulness. They appear in newspapers, magazines, and books, on
logotypes and signage, and even on the sides of city buses. Others
– inexplicably – fall rapidly into obscurity.
Underrated type almost deserves extra
attention, primarily because it is good type, and secondarily because
it is – curiously – unseen and unused. I’ve compiled
a list of underrated faces, and at the top rests Columbus,
designed by Patricia Saunders and issued by Monotype in 1993.
Slightly heavy yet well-honed, Columbus
is a hybrid of cultures and centuries, in that the Roman appears to
derive from Venetian types of the late 1400s, whereas the italic (at
least in the lower case) seems more a descendant of French letterforms
of the early 16th century. But the mix is harmonious; the interplay
among roman, italic, small caps, and numerals is exceptionally fluid.
Moreover, full sets of ligatures are supplied, as are text and lining
numerals as well as borders and fleurons.
This begs the obvious question: Why,
a decade after its release, is Columbus so little known and so rarely
seen? Several factors could contribute: Like another Monotype digitization
of the 1990s – Pastonchi – it is under-marketed; unlike
other Monotype faces, it has not been given away as a part of an operating
system; maybe most people do not find it as beautiful or useful as
I do.
At the very least, Columbus is well-made,
thoughtfully equipped, and relatively inexpensive to license. Surely
all typefaces should boast as much.
16-November 2002
tex ramblings 3: from tex to typography (a tutorial on using postscript
typefaces with latex)
So now that you have it installed and can process documents, you find yourself getting
impatient. After all, you are a typographer, no? Computer Modern,
which is Knuth’s interpretation of Monotype Modern No. 8a, is
beautiful and versatile, but it only takes you so far. Simply put,
you want to use other fonts. Specifically, you want to see the PostScript
typefaces for which you shelled out hard-earned cash come to life
within TeX.
Well, you can, and the purpose of this entry is to show you how. I’ll focus
on LaTeX, actually, and I’ll begin with the PostScript faces
freely available with TeX. Then, I’ll take you through an easy
installation of Adobe Garamond (with the expert set) using pre-built
files. Finally, I’ll show how the same face can be installed
“from scratch” and how text numerals can be used.
Before launching in, however, I should say that the best print references
for using PostScript fonts with TeX are (1) Goosens, Rahtz, and Mittelbach,
The LaTeX Graphics Companion; and (2) Hoenig, TeX Unbound;
this post is no substitute. I’ll add that everything below applies
to TeX (MiKTeX) running under Microsoft Windows.
Part 1
Using the standard PostScript typefaces
There is a wonderful command for loading LaTeX
packages, whether they be packages that call typefaces, specify leading
or character spacing, or load graphics. It is called
\usepackage,
and it is placed somewhere between
\documentclass{...}
and \begin{document}.
Open the file called sample2e.tex and
place the command \usepackage{times}
on the line above \begin{document}.
Process, and view the result using YAP (Yet Another Previewer), GSView,
or Acrobat Reader. See what happened? The typeface, with the exception of
the mathematics, was changed from Computer Modern to Times Roman.
Times is one of “the 35 PostScript fonts” you may have heard about. These
fonts were distributed with the Apple LaserWriter Plus in the mid-1980’s
and are standard issue with TeX. Eight typefaces comprise these 35
variants, which are: Times Roman, Palatino, New Century Schoolbook,
AvantGarde, Bookman, Helvetica, Courier, and Zapf Chancery.
Now try Palatino; voila, you get Palatino. This seems easy; let’s try New Century
Schoolbook. What? “LaTeX Error: File ‘NewCenturySchoolbook.sty’
not found.”
Well, sometimes the font name is abbreviated. But abbreviated to what? How would you
know? Take a look in /tex/latex/psnfss; you find times.sty. Scrolling
back to the n section, you find newcent.sty; and sure enough,
\usepackage{newcent}
works! But you look deeper, and you find .sty files for a wide variety
of typefaces: Apollo, Imprint, and Octavian, just to name a few. In
fact, you find .sty files for many more than the 35 basic fonts.
A confession: When I was new to TeX, and before I knew anything about type, I tried
for hours in vain to get the face Apollo to appear in my document.
I hadn’t yet realized that the distribution was helpful in providing
some of the architecture to make Apollo work, but not so helpful that
it would hand over the actual typeface for me. I had to license typefaces
to get them to work. Who knew?
Now, these 35 PostScript fonts are resident, and by specifying the typefaces that
comprise them with the \usepackage command, you will call them whether
you process your file with YAP, dvips, or pdfLaTeX. But when you wish
to reach beyond these fonts – and you will – things become
more complicated, albeit not much more so. Let’s install Adobe
Garamond, replete with expert characters, using the files and formats
already supplied for us, and let’s make it work such that you
can view the output with GSView and Acrobat Reader.
Part 2
Using other PostScript typefaces with LaTeX: Pre-assembled files
So what does the call to \usepackage actually do? In order to answer this question,
you’ll have to start looking at some files. Let’s begin
with xagaramon.sty; it may be found within tex/latex/psnfss. And if
not, you’ll get it shortly. There’s really not much to
this file: four lines that specify something called “padx”
as the default roman face. Yes, to make matters a bit confusing, PostScript
faces are not called by their real names. Rather, they are given three-
or sometimes four-letter abbreviations. The first letter represents
the supplier; p is Adobe’s designation. The following two letters
denote the typeface: ad is Adobe’s version of Garamond. And
the x stands for expert.
But how do you get from padx to the actual font file to output in Adobe Garamond?
Well, by the time you call xagaramon in your LaTeX file, you have
to make sure that all the supporting files – as well as the
fonts themselves – are in their correct places. Let’s
begin with the fonts that constitute Adobe Garamond; take a look at
the names of your font binary (.pfb) files. Three, four, or five letters,
followed by some underscores, to make a total of eight characters.
Unfortunately, these names just won’t do where LaTeX is concerned.
You’ll have to change them; go to /fontname/adobe.map. Scroll
down to faces 100 and 101; these numbers refer to the basic and the
expert sets, respectively. You’ll notice that the first entry
is AGaramond-Bold; this is Adobe’s font name. And whereas its
Windows name is gdb_____, its TeX name is padb8a. Select this section
and print it, and then proceed to copy all of your Adobe Garamond
.pfb files to /fonts/type1/adobe and place in a folder called xagaramon.
Now, rename them (e.g., change gdb_____.pfb to padb8a and so on).
You’re actually much of the way there! But there are several more files you need to
have in place before you’re good to go. The first of these is
a font definition (.fd) file, which links the font name to the encoding
to the style (roman, italic, etc.). Then there are the virtual font
(.vf) files, which are read by the driver and often contain information
on remapping characters in a font, as well as the TeX font metric
(.tfm) files, which specify each character’s dimensions. Finally,
there is the .map file, with which you’ve already dealt. Not
only do you need this for renaming your .pfb files, but you need to
make sure that the section of the .map file pertaining to your typeface
– in this case, Adobe Garamond – is present in the driver
files.
Fortunately, all of these files have been pre-assembled for Adobe Garamond as well
as for fonts from several other vendors and are freely available via
the CTAN page (or one of its mirrors) on the Internet. Go to http://ctan.tug.org
and then navigate to /fonts/psfonts/xadobe/agaramon/. The x in xadobe
denotes “expert” (note that most of the TeX files for
Adobe faces are found in the plain adobe directory). You will see
four subdirectories: dvips, tex, tfm, and vf. Copy the .fd and .sty
files from the tex subdirectory to your psnfss folder (under /tex/latex).
Next, copy all of the .tfm files from the tfm subdirectory to /fonts/tfm/adobe/xagaramon
(you will have to create the new folder, xagaramon). Similarly, copy
all of the .vf files from the vf subdirectory to /fonts/vf/adobe/xagaramon.
Finally, in order to process your file using dvips as well as pdfLaTeX,
copy the text from the .map file, which is in the dvips subdirectory,
anywhere into /dvips/config/ psfonts.map as well as into /pdftex/config/ psfonts.map,
if this text is not already there. You will notice that some of the
.map code specifies a SlantFont option; if used, a slanted, upright
form of the face is printed. Why in God’s name anyone would
want to do this is beyond me, although Knuth makes substantial use
of slanted Computer Modern. So, to summarize, perform the following
operations to use Adobe Garamond with LaTeX:
1. Copy .pfb files to type1 folder; rename
2. Copy .fd files and the .sty file to the psnfss folder
3. Copy .tfm files to tfm folder
4. Copy .vf files to vf folder
5. Copy applicable section of .map file to psfonts.map folders
Be sure to refresh your filename database, and then run LaTeX on sample2e.tex,
with \usepackage{xagaramon}.
Then, process using dvips and view with GSView, or process using pdfLaTeX
and view with Acrobat Reader. You should see your text in Adobe Garamond.
Although the math remains in Computer Modern, the ligatures are there,
and if you set off a word or phrase in small caps,
using \textsc{...},
you have small caps. Life is good!
But wait, what’s that – all lining figures? There must be an easy way to switch
to text or oldstyle numerals – some simple command, right? Wrong.
You can access the text figure, seven, for example, by calling the
package textcomp (available on CTAN) and then by using the command
\textsevenoldstyle. But using text numerals by default requires a
different set of LaTeX files. These are not supplied; you must generate
them anew, and this is the topic of the next section.
Part 3
Using other PostScript typefaces with LaTeX: Generating your own LaTeX files
This is a bit more laborious, but oh-so-gratifying, once you see the final
result. You will use a program called fontinst, along with two others,
pltotf and vptovf, to generate the .fd, .tfm, and .vf files. If the
fontinst directory is not part of your LaTeX package, copy it to /tex/latex.
To make things easier, copy the pltotf and vptovf executables from
/bin to /tex/latex/ fontinst/inputs/ tex. To generate the TeX font
metric information yourself, you will need to use Adobe Garamond’s
.afm files. Copy these also to /tex/latex/ fontinst/inputs/tex. Just
as you changed the names of your .pfb files, you will have to change
the designators of the .afm files to make them LaTeX-readable. Thus,
gdb_____.afm becomes padb8a.afm and so on.
Now comes the file generation part. Copy fontinst.sty and fontinst.ini to the same
folder and then run LaTeX on fontinst.sty. At the asterisk prompt,
type \latinfamily{padj}{} \bye.
The \latinfamily command is a simple
way to turn .afm files into the required LaTeX files; the j appended
to pad specifies text figures. The program runs for more than a few
seconds, and after completing, you’ll notice that you now have
a collection of .fd, .mtx, .pl, and .vpl files. The .pl and .vpl files
are simply the .tfm and .vf files in readable form. You will use the
programs pltotf and vptovf to convert the .pl and .vpl files into
binary format. Running these programs in a DOS window, you will type,
for example, pltotf padb9c.pl padb9c.tfm
for one of the .pl to .tfm
conversions and vptovf padb9c.vpl padb9c.vf padb9c.tfm for one of
the .vpl to .vf conversions. Yes, you will run this on each of the
.pl and .vpl files, one by one! I know that this operation can be
batch processed in other systems, and I’m sure it can be in
Windows; I just don’t know how.
When you’ve finished the conversions, move the newly-created .tfm and .vf files
to their respective folders in the fonts directory; move the .fd files
to the psnfss folder as well. You may delete the .pl, .vpl, and .mtx
files. Create a new .sty file by saving xagaramon.sty as xagaramonj.sty
and changing the contents to read {padj} instead of {padx}. Again,
refresh the filename database, and run LaTeX on sample2e.tex, this
time using your xagaramonj package. You should now see text figures
as default.
It will not be as straightforward as described; some tinkering will undoubtedly
be necessary. It helps to know a TeX-pert, too. I am not one, myself;
I have come this far only through much trial and error, and with a
great deal of banging my head against the wall. But I hope that this
short tutorial will be of some use to those of you who want to try
to use your PostScript typefaces with LaTeX; the journey may be arduous,
but the reward is great!
12-November 2002
alpha to omega, with stops in-between
So, who uses Greek fonts, anyway?
Well, there are the people who read and write in Greek for starters: approximately
10.6 million in Greece and thousands more around the world. Then there
are the classicists: scholars who read ancient Greek and
who study myth, language, and literature. Finally, there are the mathematicians,
statisticians, and scientists, who use Greek letters as symbols that
denote particular constants or variables.
The recent rise in the production and the increase in quality of Greek typefaces
gives all three groups reason to rejoice; with relatively new releases
by Adobe, Bitstream, and FontShop International, there is unprecedented
flexibility in typesetting Greek. The exercise of matching Greek and
Latin faces (see Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style,
2nd ed, pp106–113) is gradually approaching obsolescence.
The first “really good Greek font with accents” (Updike, Printing
Types: Their History, Forms & Use, 3rd ed, p191) appeared
in 1528 and was the work of the French printer, Simon de Colines.
But perhaps the most well-known, early Greek faces were those of Claude
Garamond: les grecs du roi – literally, the royal types
– which were produced under the guidance of Robert Estienne
and modeled on the hand of the scribe to Francois I, about a decade
after the type of Colines. The grecs du roi were cast in three sizes
(from largest to smallest, the gros-parangon, the gros-romain, and
the Cicero) and were first used in 1544 in an edition of the Præparatio
Evangelica of Eusebius (see Updike, pp234–239 for a detailed
description and samples; see also Chappell and Bringhurst, A Short
History of the Printed Word, p113).
Greek types produced in the last century continued to be based largely on
– or at least were designed to be compatible with – existing
letterforms: Matthew Carter’s Optima Greek on Hermann Zapf’s
Optima, Zapf’s Attika on Wilhelm Pischner’s Neuzeit, Adrian
Frutiger’s Univers Greek on his own Univers, and so on (see
Livingston, “Sidenote on Greek Type” in Fine Print on Type,
pp114–116).
Two of the most beautiful of the 20th century Greek types were those of the
book and type designer, Jan van Krimpen. Antigone (1928), designed
for compatibility with van Krimpen’s Lutetia (produced four years
earlier) was intended for use in mathematical texts, but its calligraphic
nature led Walter Tracy to conclude that “it is better suited
to literary...texts” (Tracy, Letters of Credit,
pp105–106).
Van Krimpen later designed a Greek companion to his Romulus (originally released
in 1936; now produced by the Dutch Type Library). This design was
based on van Krimpen’s belief that “there should be as
little differentiation [between Roman and Greek] forms as possible”
(Tracy, p112). Some of the serifed as well as unfamiliar features led Tracy
to suggest that van Krimpen “allow[ed] theory to overset practical
sense” and to conclude that “Romulus Greek mixed with Romulus
Roman does not harmonize with it; it becomes confused with it”
(p113). I disagree with Tracy’s analysis and feel that, in
the example shown on p113, roman and Greek are ideally compatible.
But then I am admittedly rather poor at mixing roman and Greek and
have nothing like Tracy’s expertise.
A renaissance in the production of Greek types began in the 1970s, when Mergenthaler
Linotype, at the urging of Costas Chryssochoides, produced Baskerville,
Century Schoolbook, Helvetica, Optima, Souvenir, and Times Roman Greeks
(Livingston, p114). A look at Precision Type’s Font Reference
Guide (v5), issued in 1995, shows that, sadly, this selection
had not appreciably expanded for nearly 25 years. But in the mid-to-late
1990s, with the implementation of the expanded character set prescribed
by Unicode, perhaps coupled with a desire of some vendors to produce
high-quality, Greek fonts that were compatible with existing Romans,
yet another Renaissance would occur. TrueType faces with Greek characters
would include Georgia, Tahoma, Trebuchet, and Verdana. And PostScript
Greek fonts included, among many others, the digital version of Chris
Brand’s Albertina, Robert Slimbach’s Minion (issued as
a component of Minion’s OpenType variant) and Warnock, Bitstream’s
digitization of Antique Olive, Optima, and Univers, as well as several
others.
The company that currently seems to emphasize
the production of Greek faces to the largest extent is FSI.
Recently, under the FontFont imprint, it has released Greek versions of
Celeste, DIN, Isonorm, Meta, and Providence; and as part of the “Instant
Types” family of Just van Rossum, it has issued Greek variants of Confidential,
Dynamoe, Flightcase, Karton, and Stamp Gothic. And with release 31 of the
FontFont library, Greek types are now available in all weights of Meta,
as well as for Alega and Elementa.
All of the Greek fonts issued by FontFont, as well as most by Bitstream and
others, are monotonic – literally, of single pitch – but
meaning that the vowels in the Greek alphabet are accompanied by few
diacritical marks. Indeed, practically speaking, modern Greek does
not use them, but classical Greek does. Greek alphabets
that include them are referred to as polytonic; the aforementioned
TrueType faces include the polytonic variants, as do several of the Linotype faces adapted
in the 1970s.
To be more specific, and perhaps more clear, these polytonic faces are distinguished
by their diacritical marks, which may be classified into four groups:
1. accents: acute, circumflex, and grave
2. breathing marks: rough and smooth
3. the iota subscript
4. the diaersis
The polytonic alphabet also may include special characters, such as the lunate and
final sigma.
One vendor deserves special mention in conjunction with polytonic faces, and
that is the Greek Font Society, based in Athens. It has recently issued
polytonic variants of Bodoni and Didot as well as the more commonly
known Porson Greek and New (or Neo) Hellenic. Porson Greek –
an elegant, sloped Greek face – was actually designed in the
early 19th century by the classicist, Richard Porson. In the 20th
century it became associated with the texts of the Loeb Classical
Library, the Oxford Classical Texts series, and the Greek texts of
St. Martin’s Press, to name a few. Victor Scholderer’s
subtly serifed New Hellenic is the standard face of the Cambridge
Classics series. For more detailed descriptions and samples of these
latter two faces in text, see Bringhurst, pp108–109, 256–261.
I should add that some versions of Greek Font Society faces are designed
specifically for use with a specialized typesetting program for scholars,
called GreekKeys.
In the digital age, the purview of type design has expanded to include mathematicians
and computer scientists. Twenty years ago, Donald Knuth produced a
sloped Greek face as a part of his Computer Modern family for use
with TeX (see Knuth, The TeXbook; see also Knuth’s Digital
Typography, 1999). Knuth also collaborated with Hermann Zapf
to produce AMS Euler, a calligraphic Greek commissioned by the American
Mathematical Society, and designed to be compatible with Knuth’s
Concrete Roman (see Knuth, Digital Typography, pp339–365
for an interesting account of this collaboration).
The MathTime face, a collection of Greek characters and mathematical symbols, was
issued in the early 1990s by Y&Y and was designed to work with
Linotype Times in the typesetting systems TeX or LaTeX. Mathematicians
have used MathTime with other Roman faces as well (see Hoenig, TeX
Unbound, pp316–344 for examples). I have found that MathTime
works particularly well, requiring few necessary adjustments, with
Linotype Janson Text and Linotype Sabon. And Lucida Greek, designed
by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes (see Holmes, “Designing a
New Greek Type” in Fine Print on Type, p130) is available
in TrueType format in standard issue as well as in PostScript format
from Y&Y and has provided mathematical typographers a bolder alternative
to Computer Modern or MathTime. More adventurous mathematicians can
also use faces such as FF Celeste, DIN, or Meta, for mathematical
typography that gets noticed.
I have not described the Cyrillic alphabet, which has enjoyed similar renaissances,
and is perhaps available in an even wider variety of faces than Greek.
This is only because I have some experience with the Greek alphabet
and none with the Cyrillic. But whether it be a Moscow-based daily
newspaper, a Greek scholar’s dissertation, or a statistician’s
monograph, the rapidly evolving world of digital type, with its room
for expanded character sets, is providing for easier, more flexible,
and ever-clearer written communication.
02-November 2002
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