Document Classes ⇒ Document Class font sizes

[ivan_hr]

Hi everybody,

Can you please tell me what are the available font sizes in document class declaration?
I am puzzled with this because this code

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\documentclass[12pt]{article}

acctually gives larger font size than this one

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\documentclass[16pt]{article}

Apperently the default font size in document class declaration is 10 pt, so if 16pt font size is not available that would explain this somewhat puzzling behaviour.

Thanks.

[west.logan]

You are correct. I believe that the only default fonts available for the Article class are 10, 11, and 12. In fact, when I ran it as a test with 13pt fonts, it gave a warning saying that there was an unused global option [13pt].

[Montag]

You both should really read "Chapter 1 Things You Need To Know" from the lshort-guide! (I'm referring to the English version.)

It'll help you a lot for future issues with LaTeX.

[west.logan]

I've read through the "Not So Short Introduction" twice in the past, is there something in particular you wanted to point out?

The main reason for wanting to enlarge the font could be for readability, or in one instance I recall, designing a poster or flier, which has a minimum font requirement that is much larger than a regular document.

[frabjous]

Well, lshort does say what the document class options, and notes that they are 10pt, 11pt and 12pt. (See Table 1.2 and Table 6.3.)

Besides font selection commands such as \tiny ... \Huge (see table 6.3), you can also do {\fontsize{##}{??}\selectfont text} where ## is the font size you want, and ?? is the value of baselineskip (e.g., the spacing between lines), so you could do \fontsize{20}{22} to get 20pt font size with 22pts between each line of text.

Depening on what sizes you pick, however, you may need to use a package such as moresize or anyfontsize.

A final option is just to create a small version, to scale, of what you want and then stretch it afterwards. (Which can be done in a variety of ways.)

[localghost]

The extsizes bundle provides special document classes derived from the standard classes that allow a wider spectrum of font sizes.

The classes from the KOMA Script bundle also allow other font sizes than the well known. Perhaps the memoir class has similar features.


Thorsten

[west.logan]

Thorsten is correct regarding the Memoir class (which I've been using for technical documentation). It has a font size ranging from 4 to 132 pts. See Table 3.9 of the documentation for the class, if you're interested.