Formatting Information

6.2.1 First time only: setting up fonts

XƎLATEX and LuaLATEX let you use all your system fonts (those that came preinstalled with your computer and your non-TEX software) as well as the ones that came with your TEX distribution. There is one small piece of preparation to do, the very first time you use LATEX: index them (properly speaking, cache them) for fast access. After that, you only need to re-index them if you buy or download a new font.

Without this indexing, you can still use your system fonts in LATEX documents but you would have to type in where to find each font file every time, which is tedious.

There are four places where fonts are usually installed on Linux TEX systems:

1. the system fonts directory (installed by your operating system, wordprocessor, and other ‘office’ software)

2. the TEX distribution font directory (where the fonts go that came with TEX)

3. the shared TEX additional fonts directory (only relevant for multi-user shared systems; traditionally this is where system managers would put extra fonts for everyone to use)

4. the ‘local’ shared TEX fonts directory (only relevant for multi-user shared systems: traditionally this is where authorised users would put extra fonts for everyone to use)

5. your Personal TEX Directory fonts subdirectory (where you put fonts you buy or download for your own use)

The last one (your Personal TEX Directory) is automatically searched by LATEX and never needs indexing, so it is not in the examples below.

Each fonts directory will normally have subdirectories for the different types of font, eg truetype, opentype, type1, etc.

6.2.2 Set the default font family for a document

As explained in § 6.2 (this section), Computer Modern is the built-in default typeface, so that’s what you get if you don’t specify anything else. There are three ways to specify other typefaces and individual fonts: a ) by using a package; b ) by font name; or c ) by filename.

Using a package is more convenient, especially for whole typefaces, because the configuration of all the component fonts (eg roman, italic, bold, bold-italic, math, etc) has already been done by the package author, but font names or filenames let you specify your system (non-TEX) fonts, which packages cannot do.

\usepackage[default]{cabin}

6.2.2.2 OpenType and TrueType fonts and faces by fontname

The fontname of a font is the name that the designer declares is the name of the font family (like Cabin), or sometimes the name of the individual font (like Almendra-Bold). It is not the filename, although sometimes they happen to be the same. The fontname is the name you see in lists of fonts like the font dialog drop-down menu in editors.

You need the fontspec package to use OT and TT faces and fonts by fontname. This package provides three commands to select font families: \setmainfont (for the roman or main face); \setsansfont (for the sans-serif face); and \setmonofont (for the typewriter or monospace face). These all take one compulsory argument: the fontname of the font family or typeface (we will see in § 6.2.2.3 below how to do this with filenames).

Exercise 6.5 — Try setting up fonts by fontname

1. Open a new LATEX file in your editor (pick a blank or epty one if your editor offers templates)

2. Copy and paste this text into the file:

   \documentclass[12pt]{article}
   \usepackage{fontspec}
   \setmainfont{Crimson Pro}
   \setsansfont{Cabin Regular}
   \setmonofont{TeX Gyre Cursor}
   \AtBeginDocument{\LARGE}
   \begin{document}
   This is the main (default) font
   
   \sffamily This is the sans-serif font
   
   \ttfamily This is the monospace font
   \end{document}

3. Process the document and examine the PDF. You may notice that the sans-serif font (Cabin) and the monospace font (Cursor)looks larger than the main font (Crimson), even though they are all set to the \LARGE size (about 18pt, see Table 6.4 below). This is because fonts are designed with different heights to the lowercase and uppercase characters.

4. Compensate for this by adding the option Scale=MatchLowercase to the sans and mono commands:

   \setsansfont{Cabin Regular}[Scale=MatchLowercase]
   \setmonofont{TeX Gyre Cursor}[Scale=MatchLowercase]

5. Reprocess and see that the sans and mono fonts have now been loaded at a size which matches the main font

There are packages for the TEX Gyre fonts, like tgcursor (they all start with tg), have a matchlowercase package option which does this scaling.

Most of the time that’s all you need.

You can find the fontnames of any of your installed fonts by using your font browser or indexing command provided by your operating system.

On Unix & GNU/Linux systems, and on Windows systems with TEX Live installed, the command fc-list can be used to list your installed fonts, giving the filename (location), fontname (and synonyms), and the style, eg

$ fc-list Cabin
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/
  cabin/Cabin-Bold.otf: Cabin:style=Bold
  cabin/Cabin-BoldItalic.otf: Cabin:style=Bold Italic
  cabin/Cabin-Italic.otf: Cabin:style=Italic
  cabin/Cabin-Medium.otf: Cabin:style=Medium
  cabin/Cabin-MediumItalic.otf: Cabin:style=Medium Italic
  cabin/Cabin-Regular.otf: Cabin:style=Regular
  cabin/Cabin-SemiBold.otf: Cabin:style=SemiBold
  cabin/Cabin-SemiBoldItalic.otf: Cabin:style=SemiBold Italic
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/
  impallari/cabin/Cabin-Bold.otf: Cabin:style=Bold
  impallari/cabin/Cabin-BoldItalic.otf: Cabin:style=Bold Italic
  impallari/cabin/Cabin-Italic.otf: Cabin:style=Italic
  impallari/cabin/Cabin-Medium.otf: Cabin:style=Medium
  impallari/cabin/Cabin-MediumItalic.otf: Cabin:style=Medium Italic
  impallari/cabin/Cabin-Regular.otf: Cabin:style=Regular
  impallari/cabin/Cabin-SemiBold.otf: Cabin:style=SemiBold
  impallari/cabin/Cabin-SemiBoldItalic.otf: Cabin:style=SemiBold Italic

From which you can see that, on my own system, I have Cabin installed twice: once by the operating system and once by TEX Live. The important bit is between the first and second colons: the fontname Cabin, in this case a font family because there are no other values. Each entry gives the filename, the fontname, and any variants, separated by colons. If I do the same for Almendra, I get:

$ fc-list Almendra
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/
  almendra/AlmendraSmallCaps.ttf: AlmendraSmallCaps:style=Regular
  almendra/Almendra-Bold.ttf: Almendra:style=Bold
  almendra/Almendra-Regular.ttf: Almendra:style=Regular
  almendra/Almendra-BoldItalic.ttf: Almendra:style=Bold Italic
  almendra/Almendra-Italic.ttf: Almendra:style=Italic

Some font entries have multiple values for the fontname, separated by commas, like Alegreya,Alegreya Black. In these cases the font family’s fontname is the first one (before the first comma).

$ ls -l /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation
total 2088
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 118296 Feb 22  2020 LiberationMono-BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 105460 Feb 22  2020 LiberationMono-Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 124012 Feb 22  2020 LiberationMono-Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 108172 Feb 22  2020 LiberationMono-Regular.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 135124 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSans-BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 137052 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSans-Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 162036 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSans-Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 128468 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSansNarrow-BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 110252 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSansNarrow-Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 132452 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSansNarrow-Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 113028 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSansNarrow-Regular.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 139512 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSans-Regular.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 151452 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSerif-BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 147132 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSerif-Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 145028 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSerif-Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 152408 Feb 22  2020 LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf

\setmainfont{LiberationSerif}[Extension=.ttf,
  Path=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation/,
  UprightFont=*-Regular,
  BoldFont=*-Bold,
  ItalicFont=*-Italic,
  BoldItalicFont=*-BoldItalic]

\setsansfont{LiberationSans}[Extension=.ttf,
  Path=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation/,
  UprightFont=*-Regular,
  BoldFont=*-Bold,
  ItalicFont=*-Italic,
  BoldItalicFont=*-BoldItalic]
\setmonofont{LiberationMono}[Extension=.ttf,
  Path=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation/,
  UprightFont=*-Regular,
  BoldFont=*-Bold,
  ItalicFont=*-Italic,
  BoldItalicFont=*-BoldItalic]

6.2.3 Changing the font-family temporarily

To use a different font [family] for a specific purpose, use the command \newfontfamily. This works exactly the same as the commands above for setting the main, sans, and mono font families but takes an extra parameter first, to specify the command you want it known by, so it does not replace the Roman, Sand, or Monospace defaults but is available in addition to them. To make the command \tablesfont invoke Liberation Sans Narrow, for example, you would use:

\newfontfamily{\tablesfont}{Liberation Sans Narrow}

\newfontfamily{\tablesfont}{LiberationSansNarrow}[
  Extension=.ttf,
  Path=/home/peter/texmf/fonts/truetype/liberation/,
  UprightFont=*-Regular,
  BoldFont=*-Bold,
  ItalicFont=*-Italic,
  BoldItalicFont=*-BoldItalic]

Then the new command (here, \tablesfont) can be used to switch to that typeface.

To load a solitary font (that is, not a whole family), there is a command \newfontface, which also works in the same way, by creating a new command to switch to it.

\newfontfamily{\headlinefont}{LobsterTwo-Bold}
  [Extension=.otf,
   Path=/usr/share/fonts/opentype/lobstertwo/]
...
{\centering\headlinefont\fontsize{20}{24}\selectfont
  Lobster Rolls\dotfill \$3.95\par}

These commands created by \newfontfamily, like the ones in Table 6.2 below, are called ‘unscoped’ because they have global effect from that point on. In order to restrict the effect to a smaller scope (a few words, for example), you MUST put the command and the text inside a group (enclosed in curly braces as in the example, or within an environment), otherwise they will apply to the end of the document. See the sidebar ‘Grouping’ below for more detail.

In a normal document, of course, arbitrary typeface changes like this are rare: people don’t (or at least, probably shouldn’t) randomly flip from one font to another. You select your default typefaces once, using packages or commands, at the start of the document, and stick with them — bold and italics are handled by the document class or stylesheet packages you use.

However, in advertising or magazines, a wide range of typefaces changes is common, but they are usually part of predefined styles for handling that type of formatting, built into the document class, so it is rare to have to do them manually.

Most cases where people want unusual typeface changes involve things like special symbols or effects on a repetitive basis, and LATEX provides much easier (programmable) ways to make these changes into shorthand commands (called macros: see Chapter 7 ‘Programmability’ below).

This is jumping ahead a bit, but you could, for example, define a new macro called \product which would let you typeset product names in a distinct typeface (usually italics):

Andlinger, Inc., has replaced \product{Splosh} with 
\product{SuperSplosh}.

This is one of LATEX’s most powerful features. It means that if you needed to change your \product command at some later stage to use a different font, you only have to change the font-family name in the macro, and you don’t need to edit your document text at all. What’s more, a macro could do other things at the same time, like add an entry to an index of products.

Vastly more common are changes to type style, while staying within the same font-family.

6.2.4 Changing type style

Within each typeface or font family there are usually several different ‘looks’ to the type design. LATEX distinguishes mainly between font shape and font series. Italics is a shape (look carefully: the actual shape of the letters changes, as well as their slope); whereas bold is a series (same shapes, same slope, just thicker strokes).

Table 6.2: Typeface styles, families, shapes, and series (unscoped)

Type style	Command	Example
Upright	\upshape*	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Italic	\itshape
Slanted	\slshape*
Small Caps	\scshape*
Bold	\bfseries*
Extended	\bfseries†
Sans-serif	\sffamily	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Monospace	\ttfamily	quick brown fox jumps over the lazy

• These are unscoped commands (see the sidebar ‘Scope and style’ below).

• *  Not all typefaces have all variants! Some only have bold and italics.

• †  Some typefaces do not have both bold and bold extended: by default LATEX uses \bfseries for bold extended.

Beware of pushing your fonts beyond their limits unless you have typographic skills. It is not normally meaningful to combine one shape or series class with another of the same class, such as trying to get slanted-italics. It’s also sometimes impossible to combine one family with another (such as seriffed sans-serif type!). Slanted plus italics, for example, doesn’t make any sense, as italics are already slanted; and while some typefaces may well possess sans-serif italic small caps, they are not in common use.

If you really feel you need such combinations, try the fontaxes package, which splits the ‘shape’ axis into a primary axis (upright, italic, slanted, upright italic, etc) and a secondary axis (small caps on or off). It redefines the \itshape and \scshape commands to combine instead of override each other. The fontspec package loads fontaxes. So do many legacy font packages. (Thanks to @Davislor on tex.stackexchange for this information.)

Sans-serif and monospace (typewriter) are not just different fonts, they are often different typeface families entirely.

To avoid the problem of forgetting to put curly braces around the commands and text you want formatted, there is an alternative set of scoped commands for the most common type shape and series commands. These use curly braces in the ‘argument’ manner, so their effect applies only to the text in curly braces. These are the normal commands for changing the style of a word or phrase.

These are commutative too, so you can nest them inside one another:

...\textbf{bold \itshape{italic \textsf{sans-serif}}} type...

What we know as underlining isn’t a font: it was used in the days of typewriters where italics were not available, and it is extremely rare in typography except for specialist purposes. If you think you need it, use the ulem package with the normalem option, which provides a \uline command.

6.2.5 Font sizes

LATEX has built into its defaults a set of predefined font size steps corresponding more or less to the traditional sizes available to metal typesetters. This is deliberate, as these sizes have grown up over 500 years of experience in printing as those which go best together for book-work, which is where TEX originated.

These sizes are also reflected in the size steps at which Computer Modern was designed in the METAFONT program. It often comes as a surprise to new users that many typefaces are not designed as a single font and just scaled up or down, but specially drawn at different sizes to make them more legible.

As an example, , and , and so you can see there really is a significant difference.

Modern type formats have hinting parameters that allow scaling to implement the effects of design-sizes, but in general, you probably don’t want to go scaling fonts too far beyond their design size because the spacing will start to look very odd.

• The default sizes (and the commands that operate them) are based on the use of a 10pt font, which is the default size for book work.

• Using the larger document class options (11pt and 12pt) will use 11pt and 12pt designs (explicit or hinted), with the other sizes (such as for headings) rescaled to match.

• The exact sizes used are listed in the macros in the Class Option files size10.clo, size11.clo and size12.clo.

• LATEX’s default fonts above 10pt are in fact scaled by a factor of 1.2, as shown in the fourth column of Table 6.4 above.

While these shorthand commands relieve the beginner of having to worry about the appropriate point-size for a given task, if you need very specific sizes you can use the \fontsize command to specify exact sizes. This takes two arguments: the point size and the baseline distance. The example below gives you 22pt type on a 28pt baseline (ie with 6pt extra space or ‘leading’ between the lines).

{\fontsize{22}{28}\selectfont The example below gives you
  22pt type on a 28pt baseline (ie with 6pt extra space or
  `leading' between the lines).\par}

The term ‘leading’ comes from the old metal-type practice of adding a strip of typemetal between the lines, or casting the type on a deeper body, to increase the line spacing, so it’s pronounced ‘ledding’ after the metal.

If you are using pdflatex or the original latex processor, you will need to use the fix-cm package to override the step sizes. This needs special placement: it MUST come at the start of the document, even before the \documentclass command, and MUST be invoked with the \RequirePackage command normally used only by document class designers:

\RequirePackage{fix-cm}
\documentclass{article}
...

6.2.6 Logical markup

All this playing around with fonts is very pretty but you normally only do it for a reason, even if that reason is just to be decorative. Italics, for example, are used for many things:

Humans usually have no problem telling the difference between these reasons, because they can read and understand the meaning and context, and we’ve been exposed to many of these meanings since we started to read. Computers cannot (yet) do this reliably, so it has become conventional to use descriptive names which make the distinction explicit, even though the appearance may be the same.

LATEX has some of these built in, like \emph, which provides emphasis. This has a special feature because when the surrounding text is already italic, emphasis automatically reverts to upright type, which is the normal practice in typesetting.

This has a special feature because {\itshape when 
the surrounding text is already italic, 
\emph{emphasis} automatically reverts to 
\emph{upright type}}, which is the normal practice 
in typesetting.

This sensitivity to logic is programmed into the definition of \emph and it’s not hard to make up other commands of your own which could do the same, such as \foreign or \product.

But why would you bother? In a short document it’s probably not important, but if you’re writing a long report, or a formal document like an article, a book, or a thesis, it makes writing and editing hugely easier if you can control whole groups of special effects with a single command, such as italicising, indexing, or cross-referencing to a glossary. If a format needs changing, you only have to change the definition, and every occurrence automatically follows suit.

A warning from the past

Beware of this ‘vaine conceipt of simple men, which judge things by ther effects, and not by ther causes’. (Edmund Spenser, 1633)

It’s hugely more efficient and productive to have control of the cause than the effect.

It also makes it possible to find and act on groups of meanings — such as making an index of scientific names, or retrieving all product names — if they are identified as such. Otherwise you’d spend weeks hunting manually through every \textit command to find the ones you wanted. This is the bottom line of automation: it can save you time and money.

In Chapter 7 ‘Programmability’ below we will see how to make your own simple commands to do things like this.

6.2.7 Colour

You can typeset anything in LATEX in any colour you want using the xcolor package. Adding the command \usepackage{xcolor} to your Preamble (note the US spelling of color) makes available a default palette of primary colours: red, green, and blue for the RGB colour model used for emitted light (computer and television screens), and cyan, magenta, yellow, and black for the CMYK colour model used for reflected light (printing).

For the occasional word or phrase in colour, use the command \textcolor with two arguments, the colour name and the text: \textcolor{red}{like this} to get red like this. There is an unscoped \color command as well, for use within groups:

...{\color{blue}some text in blue}...

There are several package options for additional colours: two popular ones are dvipsnames, which provides a 64-colour palette of predefined colour names exactly matching the big box of 64 Crayola™ colouring pencils much favoured by artists and designers; and svgnames, which provides the 256 colours defined in the specification for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) drawing and diagramming language (which includes the 64 colours of dvipsnames). There are others too: see the documentation for the xcolor package.

If you want the Crayola colour Crimson, and you have loaded xcolor with the svgnames or dvipsnames option, you can use it as a colour name (colour names are case-sensitive):

{\color{Crimson}some red text}
\textcolor{Crimson}{some red text}

As some of the predefined colour names are quite long, you can create a short name of your own for colours you use frequently, using the \definecolor command:

\definecolor{mb}{named}{MidnightBlue}

The \definecolor command needs three arguments: your shorthand name, the name of the colour model, and the colour specification. In the case of the named model, the last argument is one of the colour names specified by the named option you loaded the package with.

Using the \definecolor command, you can also define any colour you want by giving it a name, specifying which colour model, and providing the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) or Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black (CMYK) colour values expressed as decimal fractions of 255, separated by commas. For example, an RGB colour given as (37,125,224) in decimal integer form can be given as:

\definecolor{midblue}{rgb}{0.145,0.490,0.882}

To get the fractional value, divide the integer value by 255, the maximum for each of the hues in the Red-Green-Blue colour model. You can then use \textcolor with your new colour name: midblue looks like this if you’re reading in colour. Alternatively, use the HTML hexadecimal colour model, the same as used in web pages and CSS stylesheets:

\definecolor{midblue}{HTML}{250FE0}

The xcolor package also provides two colour versions of \fbox (see § 4.6.2 above) called \colorbox and \fcolorbox which create a box with a coloured background:

\colorbox{midblue}{\color{magenta}Magenta on midblue}

The material in the second argument can have its own text colour, as in the example. The \fcolorbox has an extra first argument to specify the colour of the frame or border placed around the box. The border width is controlled by the \fboxrule setting and the separation between rule and content is controlled by the \fboxsep setting as we already saw in § 4.6.2 above.

However, combining colours is an art and a skill: using the command above to get the effect magenta on midblue illustrates why it is important to learn about colour models and palettes before trying to use them!