TeX Design Possibilities (was Re: [OS X TeX] ... the faint of heart)

William F. Adams wadams at atlis.com
Wed May 5 10:28:01 EDT 2004


I typed this up for a salesperson here at work the other week ---  
thought it might help put things into perspective here.

William

<SNIP>

  - TeX can use _any_ font --- I worked up a method for using even Mac  
OS X / AAT .dfont fonts in it, see:

http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typography

esp.

(Zapfino)
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typography/peace_on_earth.pdf
and
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typography/peaceonearth.pdf

cf.

http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate/
and the link to:
http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate/texharvest.pdf

That last also makes use of a Pantone spot colour for the silver  
watermark text on the bottom left.

(Monotype Octavian)
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typography/thebookoftea.pdf

(Adobe Garamond)
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typography/onetype.pdf
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typography/onetype-sheet.pdf

Most of those are in the TeX showcase which is available at:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase


Other fonts used in the samples already provided include Times (most of  
the books, along w/ MathTime), Myriad Multiple Master (Sandefur), Gill  
Sans (Kaplan), Frutiger (Jain) and Officina Sans (Wickert).


I have a page specifically on free texts for TeX:

http://members.aol.com/willadams/books-e-tex.html

which lists the Memoir manual which is at:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/memoir/ 
memman.pdf

Another excellent text cited there is

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/Type1fonts/ 
fontinstallationguide.pdf

Philipp Lehman's Font Installation Tutorial.


The bottom line is TeX is a Turing-complete programming system for  
typesetting and the only limits to it are human ingenuity and  
processing time / power one's ability to make said resources available  
to it.

<SNIP>

I've done silk-screening, handset a little metal type, carved wooden  
blocks, laid out pages with everything from Microsoft Word to  
CorelDRAW, PageMaker, Quark XPress, Frame/Adobe FrameMaker, Altsys  
Virtuoso / Macromedia FreeHand, Adobe Illustrator, Stone Design's  
Create, and even Adobe InDesign.

InDesign is the first program to approach TeX's capabilities in a  
reasonable fashion, but it lacks long document and math capabilities,  
and isn't scriptable / suited for batch pagination. It's also quite  
new, and wasn't available for much of the time I've been doing layout  
and design. I also hate the user interface, too Quark /  
Illustrator-like.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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