Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Styling the chapter

Monday, May 21st, 2007 | LaTeX | 13 Comments

When we write larger works, one of the places we have the most stylistic freedom is with chapter pages. The chapter page is meant to break off the flow of pages and present something new. Looking through books on the book-case we see a wide-ranging difference in chapter styles. While the standard chapter style (as seen below) is pretty decent, there’s a long way to the chapter styles of books like Unicode Standard 5.0, A History of Mathematics, or Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology.

There are plenty of different styles we can think up to create on our own, or by mimicking others’ designs (do note that exactly reproducing someone else’s design is probably a copyright infringement in plenty of places. Yay for copyright law). So instead of showing you just one style, I will try to explain the fundamentals of chapter styling by looking at the commands used, and then giving several examples ranging from the simple to the quite complex.

Before we continue, it would probably be prudent for me to point out that LaTeX contains two kinds of chapters: numbered (the normal chapters) and unnumbered (the table of contents, the bibliography, the index, and chapters placed in the front matter). The main difference is, of course, that numbered chapters contain the text ‘Chapter 1’ (for chapter one, obviously), and unnumbered chapters do not. At least in the default setup.

In memoir, the default numbered chapter is defined as written below (from page 86 of the manual):

\chapterheadstart
\printchaptername \chapternamenum \printchapternum
\afterchapternum
\printchaptertitle{Title goes here}
\afterchaptertitle
  

In their default definitions the print methods also make use of the following commands that define font settings: \chapenamefont, \chapnumfont, and \chaptitlefont. This information is almost all we need in order to create our own fantastic chapter styles. The last thing before we embard on experimenting with styles is to know how to create and use different chapter styles. This is accomplished using the \makechapterstyle{stylename}{commands} command, where commands is a series of redefinitions of the above-mentioned commands, and in order to use this style, we can use the command \chapterstyle{stylename}.

As a very easy beginning, let’s add some colour to the chapter style, by creating a ‘colour’ chapter style:

\usepackage{xcolor}

\makechapterstyle{colour}{
  \renewcommand*{\chapnamefont}{\normalfont\huge\bfseries\color{blue}}
  \renewcommand*{\chaptitlefont}{\normalfont\Huge\bfseries\color{blue}}
}

\chapterstyle{colour}

This style only redefines the fonts and leaves the rest of the chapter style intact as default. If we only had numbered chapters then redefining the \chapnamefont would be adequate, as the colour seeps through to the other commands, but since \chapnamefont is never called for unnumbered chapters, we also need to provide the colour for the \chaptitlefont command. For those not deeply into the LaTeX command architecture, then the star after \newcommand and \renewcommand means that the content of the command cannot contain a paragraph change, so for simple inline commands, tag the star on for verification purposes. Adding our new chapter style to our document we get the following page:

This, actually, did little to make the chapter style prettier, if I have to be a bit self-critical for a moment. Let us instead try to be a tad more artistic with our usual black and white palette. Using the tikz package that I have written about before, we can draw a black box with the chapter number inside and then have the title below, and this time let us make it right-aligned.

\usepackage{tikz}

\makechapterstyle{box}{
  \renewcommand*{\printchaptername}{}
  \renewcommand*{\chapnumfont}{\normalfont\sffamily\huge\bfseries}
  \renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{
    \flushright
    \begin{tikzpicture}
      \draw[fill,color=black] (0,0) rectangle (2cm,2cm);
      \draw[color=white] (1cm,1cm) node { \chapnumfont\thechapter };
    \end{tikzpicture}
  }
  \renewcommand*{\chaptitlefont}{\normalfont\sffamily\Huge\bfseries}
  \renewcommand*{\printchaptertitle}[1]{\flushright\chaptitlefont##1}
}

This probably requires a bit more explanation. We disable printing ‘Chapter’ for the chapter style by overriding the \printchaptername command with an empty body. Then we change the font for the chapter number to be sans-serif (\sffamily), and the same for the chapter title. Also we ensure that the chapter title is flushed right, that is it aligns to the right margin. Lastly we have the tikzpicture in the \printchapternum. Inside that we draw a black triangle that’s a 2cm square, and after that we print the chapter number in the middle of it. Fairly straightforward, eh? Using this chapter style in your document yields the following output:

This is, indeed, a lot better, but there are plenty of other options for chapter styles to try out. We can combine some of the concepts in the last few chapter styles we’ve tried:

\usepackage{xcolor,calc}

\makechapterstyle{combined}{
  \setlength{\midchapskip}{-60pt}
  \setlength{\afterchapskip}{2.5cm}
  \renewcommand*{\printchaptername}{}
  \renewcommand*{\chapnumfont}{\normalfont\sffamily\bfseries\fontsize{80}{0}\selectfont}
  \renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{\flushright\chapnumfont\textcolor[rgb]{.64,.79,.87}{\thechapter}}
  \renewcommand*{\chaptitlefont}{\normalfont\sffamily\Huge\bfseries}
  \renewcommand*{\printchaptertitle}[1]{%
    \raggedright\chaptitlefont\parbox[t]{\textwidth-3cm}{\raggedright##1}}
}

\chapterstyle{combined}

First we set up some distances. The -60pt fits approximately on eye measurement the amount that you need to back up for the chapter number and title to align at the top. Normally it would be better to redefine more of the chapter style to create explicit boxes for the two things that could be top-aligned, but that’s a lot more work and would actually obscure how to use the chapter styles easily, so eye measurement it is. We make the chapter number really big (80 pt to be exact), and we print it in the RGB value (0.64, 0.79, 0.87) where colours are in [0;1] for those of mathematical inclination. Lastly we print the chapter title inside a paragraph box that is 3 cm smaller than the text width in order not to have the chapter title written on top of the chapter number as that doesn’t look particularly smashing. Adding this to our document gives us the following output:

We have now seen several different kinds of chapter styles that can be (more or less) easily customised using memoir’s functionality. Creating your own chapter style is thus just a matter of overriding a couple of methods and inserting some code. Doing this gives a tremendous difference between a cookie-cutter template of a document and a customised, personal document of high quality. For those of you who need even more examples of different chapter styles, you can refer to the Memoir Chapter Style Samples document by Lars Madsen from Århus universitets institut for matematiske fag. But the most important aspect is, of course: experiment.

In closing, these are the relevant items to override in the standard setup. You may change commands so some of them become irrelevant or not used.

• Lengths: \beforechapskip, \midchapskip, and \afterchapskip
• Fonts: \chapnamefont, \chapnumfont, and \chaptitlefont
• Printing text: \printchaptername, \printchapternum, and \printchaptertitle
• More technical surrounding blocks: \chapterheadstart, \afterchapternum, \printchapternonum, and \afterchaptertitle

For more technical details, consult the memoir manual or class file.

Tags: design, LaTeX, publishing, typography

Styling the document

Monday, May 21st, 2007 | LaTeX | No Comments

Over the next few blog posts we will be looking at how we can restyle an entire document without changing its contents. This is one of the key strengths of LaTeX: separating content from style. There are, of course, several aspects of a document that can be interesting to restyle, but we will focus on some of the primary elements: the table of contents, chapter headings, part, section, subsection, etc. headings, and finally the page headers and footers. As usual, we will do this by investigating the memoir document class.

Post 0: This post
Post 1: Styling the chapter
Post 2: Styling the table of contents

Post 3: Styling the other document divisors
Post 4: Styling the page footer and header

Tags: design, LaTeX, publishing, typography

Drawing trees in LaTeX

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 | LaTeX | 6 Comments

Last time we looked at how we could import graphics in the document using the graphics package. Today, we will look at how we can create vector graphics of trees from inside our LaTeX documents. As there are many aspects of the natural sciences that requires high quality drawings of trees, graphs, etc., it should come as no surprise that there are several packages for LaTeX trying to solve this issue. Some of these are:

• pstricks,
• mfpic,
• xypic, and
• PGF/TikZ

There are advantages and disadvantages to all the packages, naturally, mfpic depends on metapost, which takes a certain mindset to use, pstricks works only with latex and not with pdflatex, xypic is primarily for diagrams and graphs, but can also be used for other things, but my definite favourite is pgf, as it works with both latex and pdflatex and generates good-looking output, at least in my opinion.

The pgf package is split in two: an easy-to-use frontend called TikZ and the backend called pgf. Today we’ll be looking exclusively at the frontend and try to draw simple trees with it.

First, let us look at an example of a tree:

\begin{tikzpicture}
    \tikzstyle{every node}=[circle,draw]
    \node {1}
        child { node {2} }
        child {
            node {3}
            child { node {4} }
            child { node {5} }
        }
        child { node {6} }
    ;
\end{tikzpicture}

What is happening here should be fairly self-evident, but let us run over it quickly. The call to \tikzstyle indicates that every node should be drawn, shaped as a circle. As for the tree, we have the root node with a 1 written in it. This root note has three children, of which the middle children has two further children. This gives us the following result (click on the image for the original PDF):

Another useful feature of TikZ is that you can name nodes so you can refer to them later on:

\begin{tikzpicture}
    \tikzstyle{every node}=[draw,circle]

    \node (root) {1}
        child { node {2} }
        child { node {3} }
        child { node (rightmost) {4} }
    ;

    \tikzstyle{every node}=[]

    \draw[-latex,color=red]
        (rightmost) .. controls +(southeast:1cm) and
                                +(right:3cm) ..
            node[near end,above right,color=black] {back}
        (root);

\end{tikzpicture}

In addition to figure 1, we can see that to name nodes we add a (name) after the node command. Once we’ve specified the actual tree, we reset the global style settings for nodes as we don’t want our edge labels having a visible circle around them. The last draw command uses TikZ’ syntax (which is alike to METAPOST’s syntax) for drawing Bézier curves and the embedded node statement is for placing an edge label. The controls statement says that the first Bézier control point is placed 1cm to the south east of the (rightmost) node, and the second Bézier control point is placed 3cm to the right of the (root) node. Thus we can draw lines between nodes easily without explicitly having to state their absolute placement.

The southeast and right in the control nodes are called anchor points in TikZ, and there are plenty other of these. There are, in fact, so many means of customising nodes that it’s impossible to cover it all here. Instead, use the PGF manual. It is very thorough and example-based, so you should be able to find solutions for pretty much everything.

Using the above code snippet we get the following result:

Before we leave the topic of drawing trees with TikZ, let’s look at the different forms of trees one can draw: trees growing downward (we’ve already seen these), trees growing upward, sideways, and trees where the edges fork down rather than go straight down, or where the edges curl down. There are plenty of possibilities. As the last example, let us look at the traditional fork down:

\begin{tikzpicture}
    \tikzstyle{every node}=[draw,rectangle]

    \node {1}
        [style=edge from parent fork down]
        child { node {2} }
        child {
            node {3}
            child { node {4} }
            child { node {5} }
        }
        child { node {6} }
    ;

\end{tikzpicture}

This requires that you add \usepackage{pgflibrarytikztrees} to your preamble, otherwise the fork down isn’t available. Once you’ve done that, this is the result of compiling the drawing:

There is plenty more to the node aspect of TikZ. Indeed, it can also be used to create graphs quite elegantly, and, naturally, TikZ doesn’t limit itself to just trees and graphs, it’s a quite versatile vector drawing language inside LaTeX. In future posts we’ll look at some more of these features.

Tags: LaTeX, programming

Importing graphics

Monday, December 4th, 2006 | LaTeX | No Comments

Most people get a sudden surprise when they need to use graphics in LaTeX as it isn’t as easy as in the good old word processor. It’s not hard, there are just some pitfalls, and like all pitfalls it has an elaborate description.

Today, I will start with the complex part in order to describe why the code is wrapped to make it easier for the user to import graphics, as importing graphics natively is by no means simple. To understand the issues we will have to understand a bit more about LaTeX.

In short, LaTeX is a domain specific language for typesetting documents. There are a number of compilers that read LaTeX and produce something in the other end. This something can be DVI (a device-independent format), PDF, HTML or whatever you may dream up.

When we are importing images, they are actually embedded inside PDF and PostScript files, thus a simple image could be constructed as follows in a PDF document:

40 0 obj
    <<  /Type /XObject
        /Subtype /Image
        /Width 256
        /Height 256
        /ColorSpace /DeviceGray
        /BitsPerComponent 8
        /Length 82938
        /Filter /ASCII85Decode
    >>

    stream
    ...
    endstream
    endobj

And in an HTML document it is just something simple like:

<img src="myimage.png" alt="some description" />

Where the image actually isn’t embedded in the document, but only referenced. Some people have actually thought up a way to use divs with different background colours to form an image directly in HTML, but… I wouldn’t recommend that approach.

LaTeX has, in fact, not the faintest idea whatsoever about how images are embedded or included by its target formats, indeed these things are termed driver specific. Thus, it’s the driver that decides what kind of image formats it supports, which is one of the main frustration points when you use LaTeX. These driver specific constructs are embedded into the output file using the \special command.

So, an obvious question is: what drivers do actually exist? The primary ‘drivers’ where images are included (DVI just carries the \special along to a ‘real’ driver without interpreting—at least most of the time) can mostly be enumerated by the target formats: PostScript and PDF. There are also other targets like provided by tex4ht that I won’t go into here. So, basically, we will be concerning ourselves with PostScript and PDF.

This driver-centric approach means that if the driver doesn’t understand the graphics format that you’re trying to import, then it won’t be displayed, and the automatic packages in LaTeX work by a conservative estimate of what most PostScript and PDF applications can handle. Thus, when we’re compiling a PostScript document (using latex and dvips, for instance), we only have the choice of importing PostScript and Encapsulated PostScript documents. And when we are compiling a PDF document (using pdflatex, preferably), we only have the choice of importing PNG, JPEG and PDF. (As a side-note both formats support MPS which is MetaPost’s output format, but more on that some other time).

Like in most programming-related topics, we wish to avoid tying ourselves to a single platform, so hard-coding the \special to output PostScript or PDF code is considered a bad thing. Fortunately David Carlisle has developed the graphics package that abstracts away the introduction of the \special for every image, thus making your document (more or less) portable again. We still have to remember that the formats are restricted to the driver we’re using. The graphics package also includes a lot of code to do other stuff like rotate and scale images, but we’ll be focusing on the \includegraphics command.

\documentclass[a4paper]{memoir}

\usepackage{graphics}

\begin{document}
    \includegraphics{mypicture.pdf}
\end{document}

If we take this document and compile it using pdflatex, and have a mypicture in one of the folders that LaTeX searches when it compiles the document, we will see something like this:

Provided that mypicture.pdf contains that lovely coloured, christmas-y snowflake. Now, sometimes the picture we wish to include in our document isn’t the right size, we might want to rotate it, or only include a certain part of it. For this purpose there’s an xkeyval interface to \includegraphics called graphicx. The keyval family of packages allows us to specify options to LaTeX commands in key-value pairs, like this:

\mycommand[key1=value1,key2=value2]{my arguments}

So what are the possible keys and values of the \includegraphics command? Some of the more notable are: width, height, and angle, but the full range of keys are described in the graphics package’s manual. So let us look at a sample for including an image but with some fancy options:

\documentclass[a4paper,oneside]{memoir}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\pagestyle{empty}

\begin{document}
    \noindent
    \includegraphics[angle=30,width=\textwidth]{test.pdf}
\end{document}

Rotating and scaling like this results in the following result:

The general thing to remember when including images in LaTeX is that the graphics support isn’t a general image library that includes everything from BMP over TIFF to RAW. LaTeX is a document preparation system that works with a few select image formats. Plenty of tools exist to convert existing images to one of the acceptable formats (PDF, PNG and JPEG for pdflatex and PS and EPS for latex).

Good illustrations always help explain problems and solutions and can provide a deeper understanding in your audience, which, I guess, is one of the big motivations in writing (other than filling your quota of yearly publications, of course). Good illustrations take a lot of effort to produce, however, but don’t be dismayed, your audience will love you for spending that time, really.

Tags: LaTeX, publishing

Initials and the saints

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 | LaTeX | No Comments

Taking a short intermission from the chapter styling, we take the time to look at a time-honoured tradition in the western world, the initial, or drop capital, or lettrine, or uncial, or…. There are, indeed, many forms and variations of these majuscule letters at the beginning of a paragraph, but they still crop up here and there in books everywhere. So, since LaTeX is supposed to be this fantastic typography and typesetting tool, let’s have at it then.

Since my artistic skills for drawing custom initials are fairly limited, I will illustrate the functionality by using the initials from House of Lime, who provides linkware TrueType fonts that you can use (be sure to check his policy before you use them, though). Otherwise several other type foundries have professionel initial fonts that you can purchase.

There are two primary packages for doing initials (unless you want to code it all yourself, but we’ll save that for some other time), namely dropping and lettrine, where the latter is the more feature complete one, so we’ll be using that.

Using Fleur Corner Caps as our initial typeface, we can construct a simple document like this (we’ll cover how to get LaTeX to use the font at a later date):

\documentclass[article,12pt,oneside]{memoir}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\usepackage[garamond]{mathdesign}

\DeclareTextFontCommand{\textfleur}
{\fontencoding{T1}\fontfamily{FleurCornerCaps}\selectfont}

\usepackage{lettrine}

\pagestyle{plain}

\begin{document}

\lettrine[lines=7,findent=0.5em,loversize=-0.15,nindent=0em]%
    {\textfleur{L}}{orem ipsum} dolor sit amet...
\end{document}

What this means is that we create an initial that occupies 7 lines, where the first line is indented by 0.5em, next lines are indented 0em further, and it’s lowered a bit by the negative amount specified with loversize. The first argument to the lettrine command is the initial, the second argument the following text that is typeset in smallcaps. This is rendered as follows (click on the image for the original PDF):

While using a typeface to provide the initial is all fine and dandy this black and white text gets a bit boring. After all, when we look at some of the medieval initials, they are a tad more colourful:

This cannot, of course, be accomplished by fonts, so we’ll have to resort to using an image of some sort. Fear not, however, for the lettrine package also supports this! (Amazing, yes). Using my extensive Photoshop skills, I have coloured one of House of Lime’s initials, namely the L from Flower and Fairy Alphabet. In order to use the image I have prepared, we add an option to the lettrine command stating to use an image, and the first argument becomes the filename of an image instead of a letter. In the version of the lettrine package I have, there is unfortunately the omission in the package that requires you to include the graphicx package manually, but fortunately this is rather easy. The modified code looks like this:

\documentclass[article,12pt,oneside]{memoir}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[garamond]{mathdesign}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\DeclareTextFontCommand{\textfleur}
{\fontencoding{T1}\fontfamily{FleurCornerCaps}\selectfont}

\usepackage{lettrine}

\pagestyle{plain}

\begin{document}
\lettrine[lines=7,findent=0.5em,loversize=-0.15,nindent=0em,image=true]%
    {fairy}{orem ipsum} dolor sit amet...

The fairy argument is, indeed, a filename of a PDF-file:

When the document is compiled, we get the following (click on the image for the original PDF):

While this precise image is probably better suited for a children’s fairy tale book than a bunch of lorem ipsum, it illustrates the versatility of the lettrine package. For those who wish to experiment even more, the lettrine manual contains descriptions of even more features and functionality, including using the colour packages to colour the initial, globally setting these settings (the ones in [...]) for all lettrines in the document and much, much more.

Last, a small caveat, the initial packages work by computing a box and placing it on the page, meaning that if you have an initial at the bottom of a page, it will hang into the footer rather than break properly to the next page. The only way to solve this is by manually inserting page breaks. This is, of course, a pity to do, so most people settle with using initials at the beginning of a chapter. This seems to work well, in my experience, as using them more often tends to overdo the effect to the point of it becoming vulgar. So don’t overdo it.

Tags: LaTeX, publishing, typography

Customising class styles

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 | LaTeX | No Comments

The basic premise of TeX is that nearly everything can be changed. So, we could change, for instance, the \maketitle command to output a page of fluffy bunnies with your title, name and other info (like \thanks) in a pink box. This will almost guarantee that your paper looks rather unique in your teacher’s pile of papers to grade—we will leave that up to you to decide whether that is a good thing, though.

Since the character @ lies in a special category (I’ll return to categories some other time—they aren’t strictly relevant to understand for the purpose of this post), it is a good choice to use as internal variables, since a user doesn’t accidentally use one. Thus, most internal commands are on the form \@myname.

So, when we write something like

\documentclass{article}

\author{Henrik Stuart}
\title{Brian, the Bunny Slayer}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\end{document}

We get a fancy first page as seen in this figure:

Not really the thing that’ll catch a child’s fancy (nor most grown-ups for that matter).

Now, what happens when we write \title is that the following command is triggered (the exact details may differ by distribution and version):

\def\title#1{\gdef\@title{#1}}

What this basically does is to globally define the command \@title to contain your argument. In our case, using \@title inside the document would print out Brian, the Bunny Slayer (sans the quotes, if your browser supports them). Likkewise \author globally defines \@author. The difference between \def and \gdef will also be covered at a later time.

So, using our knowledge, we can generate our title in a… ehm… lovely pink box, like this:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{tikz,xcolor,pgflibrarysnakes,calc}

\author{Henrik Stuart}
\title{Brian, the Bunny slayer}

\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\maketitle}{
    \newpage

    \noindent
    \begin{tikzpicture}
        \draw[snake=bumps,fill=pink,color=pink]
            (0,0) rectangle (\textwidth,6cm);
        \draw[snake=bumps]
            (0,0) rectangle (\textwidth,6cm);
        \draw (.5\textwidth,4cm) node[baseline]
            {\color{white}\bfseries\Huge\@title};
        \draw (.5\textwidth,2cm) node[baseline]
            {\color{white}\bfseries\itshape\Large\@author};
    \end{tikzpicture}
}

\makeatother

\begin{document}
    \maketitle
\end{document}

which results in the following page:

This is probably very appetising for a 5-year old, but I’m not sure who else would want such a title page.

This, however, is not the primary point of this post—albeit it has taken up considerable space. Imagine that you’re working on your LaTeX document in a somewhat diverse group whose members use different distributions on different operating systems. Then \@author could’ve been \@author, or something entirely different, leading to an error when the other group members try to compute the document.

The \maketitle redefinition is a fairly benign command to modify, but imagine if you had to look up the internal commands for altering the layout of the table of contents, list of figure, chapters, sections, etc. Also imagine that the internals can be changed by a new version, rendering all your old documents obsolete. Thus, it is probably for the best to use a popular document class, as it is likely it will quickly be updated to accomodate a new version (or not need to be modified at all), and you can settle with just updating in one place.

The document class of choice isn’t article, report or book that most tutorials use, but rather memoir, which has been written to limit the amount of packages you need, and to provide a great deal of control over the layout and typography of your document. To use memoir, it has a dense and very useful documentation that I would suggest you pursue. It even contains a very good part on typography that is valuable reading. Most of my future posts will be using memoir, so to get ahead of the game, read and enjoy its manuals (also contained at the above link).

Tags: LaTeX, programming, publishing

A typographical beginning

Monday, October 30th, 2006 | LaTeX | No Comments

For the most part, LaTeX is used almost exclusively in the academe, by some few publishers and by some companies that are largely populated by disaffected college students.

So, despite its fairly limited widespread use, it is by far one of the best tools for typesetting articles and books, in particular for mathematical equations. However, I won’t spend a lot of time presenting the basics in this blog, but rather spend time on stepping away from the mediocre standard layout it presents a user with. In short, we will look at ways that we can customise the many aspects of LaTeX to suit our smallest whims. We do this by looking at how we can ensure separation of content and layout, much like the basic premise of the division between HTML and CSS.

So, for the first post here are some pointers to some introductory LaTeX documents. The future will step up the bar quite a bit, so you can start with preparing by deepening your understanding of LaTeX.

With that, enjoy your reading, or check back once in a while for new and exciting updates. If you have a suggestion for a topic you’d like to see covered, let me know in the comments.

Tags: LaTeX, publishing, typography

Graph illustrations

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 | LaTeX, Personal | No Comments

When we typeset documents for publishing, be it articles, journals or books, there is another important aspect to it, apart from the content: the layout. The hyphenation should be sensible, it should use ligatures properly, and the fonts shouldn’t change throughout the document. It is this last quality that can be rather tricky to maintain if you are importing figures into your document.

In Computer Science there’s a fairly prevalent need to create illustrations of graphs-no, not the ones plotting x- and y-values on a grid, rather the one with vertices and edges-and we can use software solutions such as GraphViz to draw our graphs based on fairly concise specifications. However, as always, there’s a catch: GraphViz presumes that we’re doing everything using TimesRoman at point size 12. This invariably leads to a problem if we are using Garamond at point size 11, namely that the fonts differ between your document text and your illustrations and you have lost some of the quality of the layout, much like you would have lost some of the quality of your content if you consequently forgot to place commas everywhere.

Solving this is incidentally part of my latest paper, Workflow optimisation for graph illustrations (PDF), where I look at synchronising the fonts between GraphViz and documents that are typeset in LaTeX. The paper will also be linked from the research section sometime in the near future when the need to update the different pages of my site strikes me. For those of you who are interested in learning more about what LaTeX may do for you, I will look at the possibility of running a series of posts on packages in LaTeX you can use to alleviate a lot of your problems, for tweaking your layout, and to create stunning output, but don’t hold your breath waiting for these posts. They keep me busy at the university.

Tags: design, LaTeX, publishing, typography, university