OpenOffice.org Off the Wall: Fonts of Wisdom (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 16, 2004 18:49 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

>don't ask undergrads to learn it.

Why not? How difficult is this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{times}
\begin{document}

\section{First Section}

... text ...

\section{Second Section}

... text, etc. ...

\end{document}

Process the file with pdflatex file.tex and there you go. If you add \usepackage{hyperref} you can even have all the sections, table of contents, URLs, etc. made into PDF links for you automatically. With a little basic documentation it's not hard at all. (IMHO). I do admit though that finding that basic documentation can be a challenge for the beginner. But if you're teaching undergrads to do it, presumably you would provide them with said docs.

Posted Apr 16, 2004 19:13 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

You can offer undergrads LyX to write latex:
http://www.lyx.org/

Posted Apr 17, 2004 4:13 UTC (Sat) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Sorry for zealots' replies to your question. I'm using Debian unstable, and the Symbol font is fine. Lowercase Latin becomes lowercase Greek, uppercase Latin becomes uppercase Greek. xfontsel also shows the font correctly.

If you cannot fix this problem and upgrading to unstable is unacceptable for you, you may want to use Greek symbols from other fonts. Many fonts include Greek symbols in addition to ISO-8859-1. Try Freefont (apt-get install ttf-freefont) - it implements almost all non-Asian alphabets.

Posted Apr 18, 2004 3:37 UTC (Sun) by prahal (guest, #18427) [Link]

Please consider it as debian specific problem, other distros don t use backports. You can bet this has nothing to do with fontconfig/freetype quality , but akin comes from a distribution/dependency bug.
You should consider contacting the maintenair of the port or try public debian forums, irc, ML which are really responsive to those kind of problems (as we lives them in unstable first).
A good introduction to these is the gmane.linux.debian.user ML on www.gmane.org, which has a search tool.
btw freetype/fontconfig is a good bet.

PS: OT query results in OT answers. This little latex flame was fun .

Posted Apr 22, 2004 20:43 UTC (Thu) by spitzak (subscriber, #4593) [Link]

This is a serious misunderstanding of how people use fonts by the Freetype/fontconfig
guys. The reason people choose the "Symbol" font is that they *LITERALLY* want the
code for 'A' to draw a greek alpha. It does NOT mean they want "access to the Unicode
entry for the Greek Alpha".

In fontconfig, to get a Greek alpha, not only do I have to send the special code for greek
alpha, I have to select the Symbol font. Why do I have to do both these steps, when the
unicode completly indicates what I want to do?

If Fonts were done right, I should be able to print the unicode entry for Greek Alpha and
get a Greek Alpha no matter what the current font is. Possibly some fonts will draw a
nicer one than others, but no matter what the setting is I should get an image that is a
greek alpha, perhaps from a 16x16 fallback bitmap for the entire Unicode glyph set.

"Selecting Symbol font" is for *BACK COMPATABILITY*. If it does not cause the code
for 'A' to print an alpha, it is USELESS. Microsoft understands this. The fontconfig people
don't. And this is exactly the sort of thing that is causing people to not like Linux.

Posted Apr 23, 2004 16:36 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Sounds like a font encoding problem to me. Reminds me of problems I have
when I accidentally select a unicode font encoding rather than an
iso-8859 encoding.

Since I don't use OOo much I'm not sure if that helps though.

Posted Apr 16, 2004 16:29 UTC (Fri) by BruceByfield (guest, #20966) [Link]

Actually, I have heard of them. However, I consider that they fall under the "esoteric" that I mentioned. The article was already long enough without going into detail on every exception.