On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 04:18:12PM +0000, Andreas wrote:
> Some of you might be familiar with the poor quality of the fonts when
> viewing a pdf file created from a lyx document. The fonts look
> pixelised and it is not possible to mark text.
Only if you use the default Computer Modern fonts.
Now, with all due respect to Knuth as a great scientist,
he's not a great designer, and I prefer to use fonts designed by
Hermann Zapf -- art is an art (Palatino is used in IEEE Transactions,
anyway).
If you choose Layout->Document and in the dialogue that opens set Fonts
button to "palatino" (or some other non-default), there are no problems
with PDF whatsoever. Well, almost. Math is still in Computer Modern
and comes out fuzzy in PDF.
Solution: add to the preamble
\usepackage{euler}
Euler fonts were designed by Zapf (with Knuths programming help) for AMS
(American Mathematical Society) to look, as Knuth puts it, like a math
written on a blackboard by a mathematician with perfect handwriting.
Knuth used Euler in his book "Concrete Math".
Euler and Palatino match amazingly well (Zapf did design both, but
still, the match is too good for the fonts created so far apart in
time) for math and text.
Now, if you still prefer Computer Modern (CM from now on) for math, and
find that you mostly produce Postscript and PDF, you can enforce the use
of Type1 fonts for CM. Find (depending on distribution)
/usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/updmap
or
/usr/local/share/texmf/dvips/config/updmap
Change the lines:
type1_default=false
# type1_default=true
to
# type1_default=false
type1_default=true
and run updmap to update maps (all this as superuser).
Then, the CM math will be in Type1 with your Postscript fonts (Palatino,
Times, whatever).
> The reason for this is the
> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
> statement that lyx automatically adds to the document header.
If you use Postscript fonts, this is not an obstacle at all.
With CM fonts, this is true, but there's a simple solution.
> Commenting it out would do the trick but we don't want to lose the European
> special characters, so an additional package can be used to fix this:
>
> \usepackage{ae}
> should always be included when fontenc is included.
> According to
> http://www.uni-koeln.de/rrzk/kurse/unterlagen/latex/ergaenzungen/pdftex.pdf
> (if you read German), this controls the use of AE-fonts (whatever they
> are) that are needed to support the use of Type1 Fonts in pdf.
You just need to select Layout->Document and in the dialogue that opens
set Fonts button to "ae". That's simple enough.
> For the moment, I have helped myself by putting this into my preamble
> but please check if it would make sense to always include it.
No, it wouldn't. I do not use CM, and that package is not needed for
me, and many other people who prefer Postscript fonts (Palatino, Times,
etc.) to CM.
> It would save others from the hours of debugging me and my sysadmin at
> uni have spent on this problem.
This "problem" is fairly well documented on Internet.
And it is documented in LyX: Help->Extended Features
Section "Exporting Other Formats".
> PS: Please CC, as I'm not a subscriber to this list.
Well if you expect reply you should subscribe at least for a short time.
This guy explains well why this is not a proper netiquette:
http://www.trumpetpower.com/Rants/Netiquette/
Section: Don't do drive-by postings
Best regards,
--
Zvezdan Petkovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.cs.wm.edu/~zvezdan/
