Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with typesetting

Help me learn to typeset equations like it was my job. (Why? Because it is.)

nebulawindphone — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:56:56 -0800

I am looking for a math typesetting style guide. By this I don't mean the kind of stylesheet for journal submissions that says "Be sure to use the blah-blah-blah LaTeX package and the XYZ equation environment, and our army of editorial assistants will tie up the loose ends and knock off the rough edges." (Why not? Because my advisor is involved in starting a new journal, and suddenly my labmates and I are that army of editorial assistants.) I am less interested in the technical details of mathematical typesetting. We've got our fonts chosen already, we're committed to using LaTeX and AMSMath which I speak pretty fluently, and we're distributing online so anything having to do with print is Not An Issue. In particular, I am not looking for another LaTeX user's manual — although if the advice I need happens to be buried in one, I'm okay with that. I'm also not particularly interested in simple questions of usage ("bigger parentheses or square brackets?" "~ or ¬ for negation?"), especially since a lot of those boil down to taste and convenience anyway.

I'm more interested in what you might call the visual semantics of it. (F'rinstance: How do you set a long equation so as to reveal its structure quickly and easily to the reader? How can spacing, line breaks, alignment and so on be used to produce that sort of clarity, and what other tricks are there that I'm not thinking of? What about a sequence of equations? A derivation or proof? How do you set a nonstandard symbol — an operator, function, etc. defined by the author;we get this a lot in my field — so that it's clear what its role in the equation is? This isn't a complete list of questions, but it's questions like that that I want to learn how to answer.) Aesthetic details — good spacing, good line breaks and page breaks, all-around symmetry and tidiness — are also important. The goal is to make these thorny and technical articles as easy and joyful to read as I possibly can.

Bonus points for a guide with good advice on the odd situations that come up in formal semantics and mathematical logic. (For instance, I've been unable to find any advice for laying out expressions in lambda calculus, or ones containing multiple quantifiers, and both of those are frequent sources of difficulty here.) But if that's asking too much, then I'm looking for general best practices that I can apply to the edge cases when they come up.

Need a very extended font

yazi — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:40:16 -0800

Commonplace academic book fonts that have ascii slots mapped out for "dot-under" consonants? I need to set up an InDesign project for a book. THe author has Word files that use "Times". On my PC (running XP) his extended characters (many of them being consonants with dots under, like so many of the sanskritic examples) do not show. THey will show if I re-font to Times Extended Roman. But the book must be in a nice academic serif like Minion, Baskerville, Caslon, Goudy, or perhaps Palatino. I have experimented, and I don't see those characters in the glyph list for those fonts. (Unless I have missed something.) Any help about a nice looking serif font, that reacts well in InDesign typesetting, and is like these fonts just mentioned (classic, sharp, etc) will be appreciated. Also... it must be somehow available and able to be distilled by Acrobat.

Abbé B—, who came from R— in Italy

Busoni — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:24:36 -0800

Say I'm writing a story and I want to emulate the old practice of referring to proper nouns by initials: i.e. Dr. M— from the town of S—. Where and when did this start? Why did they do this? (It hides the person's name, but from the author's perspective, is it to give his story an air of veracity, as with Defoe and Cervantes's works?) Would some names remain hidden and others not? Do I hide the last name only? If a man came from Monte Cristo, would I write M— C— or simply M—? I want as much information on this as possible. The name of this practice, if there is one, might be useful.

We have always had weird in-laws

tmcw — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:17:19 -0800

I've been tasked (by myself and others) with compiling an extensive history of my extended family on one side. More than a family tree, we're compiling stories, photos, everything we can gather about my weirdo relatives. What tools should I use to compile it? I'm a computer geek / developer / cs major, so I'm very familiar with LaTeX, etc, and willing to deal with arcane systems, write code to make things work, etc. But I'd like to do the best practice route for whatever this is. At this stage (just combining data from multiple people), Google Docs might be the way to go, since all formatting will be lost / redone in whatever system I want to use. Is there something like LaTeX which gives you a bit of ability to make things meaningful (labels, footnotes, etc) and separate presentation from data, but possibly better-tuned for long english documents than Knuth-style math?

The final output will probably be a webpage & PDF, which leads me strongly towards LaTeX because of its great filters, but I'm just wary of moving to such a tricky tool when I might want to pass editorship onto another relative, or something like that, in the future?

So, any ideas from anyone who has done this before (and yeah, I'm kind of an open-source dork, so extra points for things that are free and cross-platform)

Thanks!

What typographical knowledge from LaTeX can I apply in Word?

philosophygeek — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:23:04 -0800

What typographical knowledge from LaTeX can I apply in Word? My professional field insists upon Word documents, so LaTeX is not an option, and results from LaTeX to Word converters have not been satisfactory. So, what can I teach Word, to make it a better typesetter? I'm already familiar with the basics of styles and logical formatting. What I want to know is what typographical principles LaTex (or just TeX) uses, so I can replicate that behavior when designing my styles. Some things that TeX knows can't be (easily) replicated in Word (e.g., Knuth-Plass linebreaking), but I'm sure there are other bits of typographical wisdom buried within Tex and LaTeX that would be helpful to know. How much space should one have after a heading, before body text? How much larger should headings be compared to body text? I'm curious how LaTeX decides on these kinds of formatting questions, so I can use that knowledge in my style design.

I realize that there are not unanimous conclusions on these issues; I mention LaTeX because it seems to consider these questions in a fairly intelligent way, and it seems like a good starting point for my own typographical education.

Deeply anal-retentive font geek question about IPA fonts.

nebulawindphone — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:56:14 -0800

Roman IPA fonts and the non-roman characters who love them. I'm looking for compatible fonts — a single family, or fonts from different families that look nice together — that do all of the following:

Include a wide range of IPA and other Unicode Latin characters, at least in serifed roman and ideally in italic, bold and bold italic too.
Include monospace characters, bold monospace characters, and slanted monospace characters, at least for the plain ASCII character set.
Include small caps, at least for the plain ASCII character set.

Why, you ask? I'm a linguistics student (making the IPA and oddball Latin characters a necessity), I sometimes write software documentation (where I like to use monospaced fonts for things like user input and output) and I sometimes write about topics like metaphor and frame semantics (where small caps are conventionally used for names of metaphors or of frames).

At the moment, I'm doing all three — writing documentation for a bit of linguistics software having to do with frame semantics. We're self-publishing the result, and it would be really nice if it came out looking reasonably-professional.

Here's the fonts I've looked at: SIL's Charis and Doulos don't have monospaced characters or small caps. TITUS Cyberbit doesn't have anything but plain roman serifed characters. Computer Modern Roman doesn't have bold and bold italic monospaced characters, or bold italic serifed characters. Deja Vu doesn't have small caps.

(If all else fails, I will just use Deja Vu for everything and fake the small caps by shrinking down regular capital letters. But first, I want to satisfy my anal-retentive streak by finding out what it would take to do things The Right Way. We use XeTeX, so either TeX fonts or Type 1/TrueType/OpenType fonts will work. Professional fonts are probably not in our budget, but let me know if there's one or a set that'll do this anyway — I'm still curious what the real solution would look like.)

He couldn't just be Jr.?

gladly — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:22:57 -0800

How can I style roman numerals after a personal name set in a script typeface, like Shelley Script? This will appear on a formal invitation announcing a new board member who happens to be a "second." What is the best way to typeset, "John James Doe II"? My instinct was to spell out "the second," but that looks strange too.

Latex filter, no, the other kind of latex

jonesor — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:36:51 -0800

Latex filter (not that sort). I'm using Latex (with TexShop and Bibdesk) and I need to format a bibliography in a particular way. Please help! I need to format the bibliography so that each reference simply follows on from the one before, without a carriage return.

i.e. like this:

1. Bloggs, F. 2000 Working can be fun. Journal of Work Science 10:30-45. 2. Doe, J. 1999 Camels for beginners. Camel Racing Press 34:56-76. 3. Giles, F. 1987 Sheep are woolly. Farmers Weekly. 4:67-90.

Rather than this:

1. Bloggs, F. 2000 Working can be fun. Journal of Work Science 10:30-45.

2. Doe, J. 1999 Camels for beginners. Camel Racing Press 34:56-76.

3. Giles, F. 1987 Sheep are woolly. Farmers Weekly. 4:67-90.

Are there any style files out there that accomplish this? Or ones that can be easily edited to do it?

I'm a total beginner at this...

Picture a Venn diagram with 3 circles: LaTeX, Emacs, Mac. I'd like to live in the intersection.

gleuschk — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:08:47 -0800

Mac users who write LaTeX documents in Emacs (with or without AucTeX), please tell me about your workflow. My wife and I both recently switched (back) to Macs from Windows machines. We're mathematicians, and we both live -- or used to live -- pretty much completely inside an Emacs buffer, writing LaTeX. We've had a terrible time approximating our Windows setups on the new Macs. What Emacs version do you people use? (I've tried Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs.) What PDF previewer? (Skim, Preview, something else?) Most importantly: how is everything tied together, in your .emacs or elsewhere?

Finally, please help me understand what the point of AucTeX is. Both the emacs versions I've tried come with it pre-installed. So far, all I can see is that it adds unnecesary keystrokes when I want to typeset something, and destroys all my useful muscle-memory. Do you use it? Does it make your life better/easier?

Seeking great examples of book design in LaTeX

tomwheeler — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:24:56 -0800

I am teaching myself typesetting with LaTeX. I learn best by example and so I'm looking for some great examples to follow — especially if they're based on the Memoir class. Ideally, I'd love to find some (public domain) classic literature that stands out as a great study in syntax, style and design. What do you recommend?

UnWord Me

tmcw — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:53:32 -0800

Escaping M$ Word, but getting the same formatting... So, I'll need to type a few papers this semester. I'm using a Mac. I have Office installed, actually, but I hate it: I would rather write in LaTeX, Bean, etc. But my professors will definitely be looking for 12px Times New Roman double spaced, standard margins, etc. Are there any LaTeX templates for this, or is the typesetting engine way too different. And OpenOffice seems to be one of the least native apps I've used on my mac (even Inkscape is a lot better), so I'd rather not go that route.

Any tips on escaping this big M?

Whose line-height is it anyway?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 04 May 2008 07:51:28 -0800

What's causing these unruly line heights in my web page and how do I solve it? It's the site linked from my profile. Most of it is dynamic content so it changes fairly quickly; the snapshot linked above is how it renders for me right now, FF 3.0 b5, XP. It happens only occasionally, sometimes the lines are all the same height, as I want them to be.

I'm fairly certain I'm overlooking something, but what is it? Is it an inheritance issue? Should some other value be cleared first? Is it not line-height after all but paddings and/or margins? Something else?

Thanks in advance, guys.

Arial or Times New Roman? Single spaced? Bold?

billtron — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:08:07 -0800

Who wants to share their favorite MS Word 2003 Style themes for writing academic papers? I am a terrible typesetter. All my writing looks ugly and I don't have time to learn LaTeX before May.

How to write a mathematics paper

rolypolyman — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 17:47:38 -0800

I need to write a document with a lot of algebraic formulas. What word processor / page layout program would make this quickest and easiest? I use Windows, and have available Word, OpenOffice, PageMaker 7.0, and InDesign CS2 (whether it's layout or word processor software is not a big deal). I'd like to be able to set algebraic equations quickly and with minimum fuss so I can concentrate on the flow and writing (square roots, fractions, etc).

I know LaTeX (protext?) is often recommended for math, but I am worried about overkill and a steep learning curve. I'm not typesetting a calculus textbook or anything like that.

I am most used to PageMaker, but it has laughable math support. I considered finding a utility that creates a formula and spits out a TIF to embed in the document, but I nixed it as it could get excessively time consuming.

What would work best? I can consider cheap shareware or freeware (this is not for a professional project).

Lost Dog

avocet — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 11:54:08 -0800

Lost Dog: looking for an old educational film clip from Sesame Street. I'm looking for a live-action clip from 1970s Sesame Street, in which some children lose their dog and go to the printing house to print posters to put up around their neighbourhood (and of course the dog shows up in the end). It introduced my five-year-old self to movable type and printing and made me want to become a typesetter, which I eventually did.

I've searched through thirty pages of YouTube clips so far, and will keep on looking. Has anyone seen this around?

Thanks in advance!

Know of a good online document-collaboration system?

EmuBite — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 15:57:07 -0800

Attention authors, typesetters, and publishers: Can anyone recommend a good online document-collaboration system? I'm an editor and project manager for a large scientific journal. We recently switched publishing houses, and to my shock, our publisher does not have a digital document check-in system for authors. It looks like we're on our own when it comes to online document-collaboration.

Does anyone in the MetaFilter community have experience with web-based document collaboration? If so, what systems do you recommend? I'm not sure what our budget is, but we are willing to pay for good service.

Ideally, we're looking for a time-stamped system where authors and editors can upload and download papers. As for documents formats, we accept LaTeX, PDF, and MS Word; however, I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that most document collaboration systems don't care about file type. We also need the ability to append notes and comments to individual documents. Example:

1. Scientific article on science. (J. Smith) [Title of Document]
jsmith.tex [File name]
Dear Emubite: This article has been edited. [Note/Comment]

I hope the above example makes sense.

Can anyone recommend a good online document system? I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who work with these on a daily basis.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

How do you format "cataloging in publication" data? Is there a standard?

Alt F4 — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 08:21:11 -0800

Typesetting. I'm typesetting a children's book that'll be available to libraries. One of the components to the book is the "cataloging in publication" data (the frontmatter with the Dewey classification for the book and other pertinent info). Right now, the CIP data isn't much to look at. I'd like to make it a bit more attractive, while not modifying the content. Have any of you (librarians? publishers?) had any experience with this? I've looked for some sort of formatting standard, but I can't find anything that spells it out.

Typesetting

Aaorn — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:20:25 -0800

What's the name of the typesetting technique where font size is scaled so that every line, regardless of word length, is made to fill the space horizontally? The result being a perfectly rectangular block of text with each line a slightly different font size.