[OS X TeX] Help! Dissertation due and long dashes are faint.

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 16 juin 04, à 16:24, Brian Burge-Hendrix a écrit :

> My long dashes (---) are *very* faint when the text is set in 12 
> point. Of course, they're just fine at 11 point ... but university 
> regulations demand that the dissertation be in 12 point!

In case you're only looking at your text on screen, the difference may 
disappear when you go to printed text. Otherwise...

> It would be an unbelievable pain to switch typestyles at this point. 
> Are there any kind souls who know of a quick and dirty solution --- or 
> any feasible solution --- to make the long dashes legible again?

... I guess you're using Computer Modern: then there's not much you can 
do about it, as CM characters are very thin by design. If we were still 
using bitmap PK fonts produced by MetaFont, you could instruct MF to 
use a mode, as defined in 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/metafont/misc/modes.mf, other than 
the default ljfour and producing bolder characters, but that's not an 
option here (these fonts would be appropriate for printing but 
unsuitable for screen display).

What you can try is use Latin Modern instead of CM; that should 
practically leave the linebreaks unchanged, but give slightly bolder 
characters. Latin Modern are installed by default with the TeX 
i-Package. You select them by adding in the preamble of your LaTeX 
input:

\usepackage{lmodern}

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin
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