Text FormattingFont Sizes

Information and discussion about LaTeX's general text formatting features (e.g. bold, italic, enumerations, ...)
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beethovengg
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue Nov 16, 2010 4:55 am

Font Sizes

Post by beethovengg »

hello latex experts!

for the default size 10pt, we have the ff:

% \tiny 5pt
% \scriptsize 7pt
% \footnotesize 8pt
% \small 9pt
% \normalsize 10pt DEFAULT
% \large 12pt
% \Large 14.4pt
% \LARGE 17.28pt
% \huge 20.74pt
% \Huge 24.88pt

(Am I right with the above numbers?)

may I know the corresponding sizes for 11pt and 12pt. I read from a book "A Guide to LaTex" by Kopka and Daly that they will "all scale accordingly". Is this a "proportional" scaling? if yes, then my question is already answered. if not, then it is a "nonlinear" scaling, and therefore there must be other sizes (I read somewhere that they will look "larger" than what you expect!).

thank you

beethovengg

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localghost
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Posts: 9202
Joined: Fri Feb 02, 2007 12:06 pm

Font Sizes

Post by localghost »

The Font Sizes are scaled non-linear.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten
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Stefan Kottwitz
Site Admin
Posts: 10335
Joined: Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:44 pm

Font Sizes

Post by Stefan Kottwitz »

Hi,

document classes can handle it differently. Standard classes load an option file, depending on the font size. Let's look at the article class for example: if the document has the 10pt option, the article class loads the file size10.clo. There are those macros \tiny, \small etc. defined. They set font size, leading, and some further set spacing for displayed math formulas and lists. You can imagine, that spacing around a formula in footnote size should be less than with normal size.

The numbers for the font sizes above are correct, for the article class. For other classes I just did not check.

Let's continue with article and 10pt. size10.clo defines

Code: Select all

\newcommand\Huge{\@setfontsize\Huge\@xxvpt{30}}
The macro \@xxvpt, which looks like roman representation of arabic 25pt, is defined in latex.ltx:

Code: Select all

\def\@xxvpt{24.88}
Similar for the other values.

If you specify 11pt, article loads size11.clo with different font sizes, whereas a book class would load bk11.clo. All those files are in your TeX directory, you could read the source if you desire.

Btw. KOMA-Script classes allow arbitrary font sizes given in any TeX unit such as pt, ex, mm etc.

Stefan
LaTeX.org admin
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