Text Formatting ⇒ How to use kpfonts?

[krz]

Hi!
I was looking for fonts with old style numerals and found localghost's post about kpfonts package.
It looks great, but I have some problem. There are too much light on the page and I don't want it. Is there any way to kern or change a font? In the manual I found a sentence "Kp-Fonts provides a full set of fonts", but I don't know how to use this set. I coulndn't find any information in documentation.
I put only this

Code: Select all

\usepackage[oldstylenums]{kpfonts}

in preamble.
Thanks for any help.
krz

[Montag]

Is the document intended for print? Because in print, they look much better than on the screen, in my opinion.
Well, that is how they look. If you did not write any other command for loading a font package, then you should be good to go.

[krz]

Hi, Montag,
Yes, I prepare a book to print. First in my life and I really want to do it as good as I can. I printed a few pages at home and font (and options like oldstylenums, oldstyle etc.) looks really great, but reading is a bit tiring. There are too big spaces between letters and too small between words. Lines look sometimes like long strings of letters. Maybe if I didn't have to justify the text it'd look good. It is why I asked about kerning.
If there is no options, I'll just change a font.

[Montag]

Hi, Montag,
Yes, I prepare a book to print. First in my life and I really want to do it as good as I can. I printed a few pages at home and font (and options like oldstylenums, oldstyle etc.) looks really great, but reading is a bit tiring. There are too big spaces between letters and too small between words. Lines look sometimes like long strings of letters. Maybe if I didn't have to justify the text it'd look good. It is why I asked about kerning.
If there is no options, I'll just change a font.

Yes, you're right, sometimes I think the same about the kpfonts. Well, each to his own, maybe the line spacing needs a bit tweaking?

Or maybe URW's Palladio/TeX Gyre's Pagella is another possible choice for you? => http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/seriffonts.html

[krz]

Yes, I was trying line spacing and changing fontsize. I think {10}{13} looks optimal for pkfonts, but I need a bit larger fontsize. I've just tried Palatino and Pagella, but at last I choose Venturis. I like Utopia Regular with Fourier too, but it has no old style numerals.
Thanks for your help!
krz

[Montag]

Yeah I've just testprinted some pages of a few documents of mine again -- got nothing else to do right now -- and the letters really seem to "far away" from each other. At least it looks constant, but I formatted an article (non-academic, it's simply a media article) with kpfonts and I stopped reading after 3 pages.
While the font is really great for setting (lots of) math, read much text with it seems a bit tiring to me.
The old-style figure "3" looks quite weird, to be honest.

[krz]

As I told you, this time I'll use Venturis (I printed it and this kpfonts' "far away" problem dissapeard) but I still think about using kpfonts in the future. The sentence "Kp-Fonts provides a full set of fonts for LaTeX typesetting" is hunting me. Do you know why an author writes "fonts" while we can use only one font?
Soon I'm going to publish translation of german text from 10th century (in latin, of course) and it is why I think about old style fonts. Especially ligatures in kpfonts look great. Do you know if I can find it in other fonts too? For example in Venturis (like other fonts on tug.dk) we have only five classic ligatures.

[frabjous]

Technically speaking the bold, italic and bold-italic variants are distinct "fonts", so that alone explains the usage of "kpfonts", plural. In its case, the old style numerals version is actually technically a distinct font, and with kpfonts, there is also a "light text" variant, which is also a completely different font. (See its documentation.) And if that's not enough to convince you, kpfonts also has its own complete sans serif and typewriter fronts for \textsf and \texttt and so on. So the plural is definitely appropriate.

Apart from it, I'm not sure which fonts support the Old Style ligatures, such as ct, sp, st, etc. The only ones that come to mind are the ADF fonts such as baskervaldadf, romandeadf, and electrumadf. (In the case of electrumadf, this is just perfectly silly, since I cannot imagine anyone using that font to typeset a document where historic ligatures would be appropriate!) I like Baskervald though -- it may be one to consider.

The OpenType versions of Linux Libertine (which is farily similar to Venturis) definitely have those historic ligatures too. See the project page here. but I don't know of the Type1 variants for the libertine package have them -- or if they do, I don't know how to access them offhand. However, you could definitely get them if you used XeLaTeX rather than pdfLaTeX with the fontspec package. Of course, if you go that way, it makes the possibilities wide open, since you could use any commercial/professional font with these characters.

[krz]

frabjous, as always thanks for your help. Now the word "fonts" is clear.
Yes, electrum is funny and won't be appropriate for historical paper, but baskervald looks quite good. I'll try to install it. I write "try", because I have problem with it. Once I tried to install some fonts but it wasn't succesfull. It's quite possible I'll have to ask you for help again.
The libertine package looks interesting too.

[frabjous]

You should be able to install it through your TeX distribution's package manager, which shouldn't be too hard (and then you shouldn't need to follow the instructions in the documentation), but do ask if you get stuck.