LoweyPages - The Next Inevitable Step

Fonts

Setting the Font

The default font in LaTeX is ugly as hell.  When I started using LaTeX one of the first things I did was work out how to change the font.  Luckily for us all it's very easy to do.

\usepackage{times}

This should be placed at the top of the page, before the \begin{document} tag.

The tag loads a new package which tells LaTeX not to use the default font ("Computer Modern", bitmapped) but to instead use the Times New Roman font (scaleable).  Already you'll see a vast improvement.  Don't like serif fonts?  Me neither.  Use this instead for a sans-serif font:

\usepackage{sans}

This will use a scaleable sans-serif font which, in my opinion, looks a damn sight nicer.  In order to use the "sans" package you will need to download it.  MiKTeX (the Windows version of LaTeX) will rather handily do this automatically for you.  texmf users will need to download sans.sty [sans.sty] and put it into the directory ~/texmf/tex/latex/

Setting the Font Size

This, too, is very simple.

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}

You might not be using "article" but the "a4paper,12pt" should remain valid.  Change "12pt" to whatever font size you need.  You can even change the size of the paper you want the document size to be.  I use "a4paper" as I am in Britain.

[<< LaTeX 2e information]

Last updated 14th of October 2004 at 23:20

For web design go to Shoestring Websites!

| Home |
---
| Blog |
| Serious |
| Software |
| Linux |
| Humour |
| Tunes |
---
| Disclaimer |