Text font attributes

Every text font in L^ATEX has five attributes:

encoding

This specifies the order that characters appear in the font. The two most common text encodings used in L^ATEX are Knuth's `TEX text' encoding, and the `TEX text extended' encoding developed by the TEX Users Group members during a TEX Conference at Cork in 1990 (hence its informal name `Cork encoding').

family

The name for a collection of fonts, usually grouped under a common name by the font foundry. For example, `Adobe Times', `ITC Garamond', and Knuth's `Computer Modern Roman' are all font families.

series

How heavy or expanded a font is. For example, `medium weight', `narrow' and `bold extended' are all series.

shape

The form of the letters within a font family. For example, `italic', `oblique' and `upright' (sometimes called `roman') are all font shapes.

size

The design size of the font, for example `10pt'.

The possible values for these attributes are given short acronyms by L^ATEX. The most common values for the font encoding are:

OT1	TEX text
T1	TEX extended text
OML	TEX math italic
OMS	TEX math symbols
OMX	TEX math large symbols
U	Unknown
L<xx>	A local encoding

The `local' encodings are intended for font encodings which are only locally available, for example a font containing an organisation's logo in various sizes. There are far too many font families to list them all, but some common ones are:

cmr	Computer Modern Roman
cmss	Computer Modern Sans
cmtt	Computer Modern Typewriter
cmm	Computer Modern Math Italic
cmsy	Computer Modern Math Symbols
cmex	Computer Modern Math Extensions
ptm	Adobe Times
phv	Adobe Helvetica
pcr	Adobe Courier

The most common values for the font series are:

m	Medium
b	Bold
bx	Bold extended
sb	Semi-bold
c	Condensed

The most common values for the font shape are:

n	Normal (that is `upright' or `roman')
it	Italic
sl	Slanted (or `oblique')
sc	Caps and small caps

The font size is specified as a dimension, for example 10pt or 1.5in or 3mm; if no unit is specified, pt is assumed. These five parameters specify every L^ATEX font, for example:

Font	TEX font name
OT1	cmr	m	n	10	Computer Modern Roman 10 point	cmr10
OT1	cmss	m	sl	1pc	Computer Modern Sans Oblique 1 pica	cmssi12
OML	cmm	m	it	10pt	Computer Modern Math Italic 10 point	cmmi10
T1	ptm	b	it	1in	Adobe Times Bold Italic 1 inch	ptmb8t at 1in

These five parameters are displayed whenever L^ATEX gives an overfull box warning, for example:

   Overfull \hbox (3.80855pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 314--318
   []\OT1/cmr/m/n/10 Normally [] and [] will be iden-ti-cal,

The author commands for fonts set the five attributes:

Author command	Attribute	Value in article class
\textrm{..} or \rmfamily	family	cmr
\textsf{..} or \sffamily	family	cmss
\texttt{..} or \ttfamily	family	cmtt
\textmd{..} or \mdseries	series	m
\textbf{..} or \bfseries	series	bx
\textup{..} or \upshape	shape	n
\textit{..} or \itshape	shape	it
\textsl{..} or \slshape	shape	sl
\textsc{..} or \scshape	shape	sc
\tiny	size	5pt
\scriptsize	size	7pt
\footnotesize	size	8pt
\small	size	9pt
\normalsize	size	10pt
\large	size	12pt
\Large	size	14.4pt
\LARGE	size	17.28pt
\huge	size	20.74pt
\Huge	size	24.88pt

The values used by these commands are determined by the document class, using the parameters defined in Section 2.4. Note that there are no author commands for selecting new encodings. These should be provided by packages, such as the fontenc package. This section does not explain how L^ATEX font specifications are turned into TEX font names. This is described in Section 4.