English
19 June 2009
What are those letters supposed to mean?
I pronounce LaTeX as [ˈlɛɪtɛk]: the ‘X’ stands for the Greek letter chi. (Others pronounce it with a guttural [x] sound, but since that doesn’t occur in native English words, I use a simple [k] sound.) LaTeX is a system for typesetting that’s rather difficult to set up and learn to use, but for me was well worth it.
The chief reason why I like to use LaTeX for any largish document is that the results are so much better—compare my first edition of the KJV preface, made with OpenOffice (a free program similar to earlier versions of Microsoft Word), with my second edition, which was made with LaTeX. In my opinion, it’s much more aesthetically laid out.
A second reason why I use LaTeX is that it’s much easier to manage large documents. The fonts and styles are consistent, since the user defines the structure, while the program takes care of the nitty-gritty formatting. Thus the program can automatically create tables of contents, headers and cross-referencing. It also takes care of automatic ligatures and extra space between sentences—something that can’t be done in Word or OpenOffice.
LaTeX is free. It’s the best typographical system available for that kind of money.
I began to use LaTeX maybe about seven or eight months ago. I installed it on a Linux partition, and as I never figured out how to get it to work on Windows, I still use it on Linux—Ubuntu 9.04, to be precise, which I boot in parallel with Windows 7 RC.
Around 1:30 this morning I got the OpenType font Cambria working on a variety of TeX called XeTeX. (Watch the complete video on that page to see what OpenType fonts are.) Later versions of Windows come with six fonts in what is called the ClearType font collection: Constantia, Corbel, Calibri, Cambria, Candara and Consolas. Unfortunately, only two of these (Constantia and Cambria) are serif fonts suitable for extended text, and neither of them seemed suited for books—both are too distinctive. They seem to draw too much attention to themselves.
Around noon today I remembered seeing the font Minion Pro on our other computer a year before. I had never used that font since it didn’t look right on programs like Word. But in a short time I tried it with XeTeX, and the results were fabulous. What they don’t tell you in that video about OpenType is that TeX can use those capabilities just like the pricey Adobe Creative Suite. I mean, InDesign might be nice for professionals, but $699 is a pretty large sum.
It really made my week to be able to typeset with a professional typeface, without spending the $140 to buy each of the four fonts (regular, bold, italic and bold italic cost $35 each). I don’t have the hundred-plus OpenType fonts that come with Adobe Creative Suite (such as Adobe Garamond, Jenson, Hoefler Text or Brioso—and you really have to check at least that last one out), but now I don’t have to be disappointed that I don’t have more attractive letterforms, better kerning, real small capitals and superscripts, old-style numerals, or even rare ligatures and swash capitals.
19 June 2009
Ι’m really put out that the last half of my work was lost due to some Internet connection problem and I had to do it all over again, at the cost of—well, quite a bit of time. I’ll try not to do that again.