Digital Typography News

Yesterday evening I was trying to use the soul package with XeLaTeX but it did not work. More specifically, the command \ul did not work with Greek texts. I did some google search and I found a way to make the package usable with XeLaTeX. In the preable of your XeLaTeX file add the following… Continue reading Using the soul package with XeLaTeX

I was looking for a way to create a numbered list of items but I wanted the the numbering of items to be in reverse order (not 1., 2., 3., … but 3., 2., 1.). I thought that I would need to go deep into LaTeX internals and play with counters in the enumerate environment.… Continue reading The etaremune package

Currently, I am working on the digitization of the Fredirika font by Herman Zapf. Originally, the font was supposed to be the Greek counterpart of the Virtuosa font by the same designer, but it never became popular. I have completed the digitization of the Greek monotonic part and now I am working on the polytonic… Continue reading The Frederika2016 Typeface

Most people speak with good words about luaTeX. They seem to like things it can do that no other TeX derived systrem can do. Personally, I do not care about these features but yesterday a friend told me that he wanted to write something in Greek with luaLaTeX. And what’s the catch, one may ask.… Continue reading Why I do not like luaTeX!

The package svrsymbols has been presented at the Ψk Conference with a poster that attracted the interest of a good number of participants! The work has been documented in Ideograms for Physics and Chemistry (also available from arXiv).

On page 37 of my book on XeLaTeX I include the following example  \newICUfeature{Contextuals}{Alts}{+calt}  \setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text,Script=Greek,  SmallCapsFeatures={Contextuals=Alts}]{Universal Modern} This does not work anymore. One needs to modify this as follows:  \setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text,Script=Greek,    UprightFeatures={Contextuals=NoAlternate},    SmallCapsFeatures={Contextuals=Alternate}]{Universal Modern} If one omits the UprightFeatures part, then the SmallCapsFeatures apply everywhere.

If one uses XeTeX, then the following commands can be used to create a PDF which cannot be printed: $ xelatex -no-pdf my_doc $ xdvipdfmx -K 120 -S -P 0x0800 my_doc.xdv

A spot color is a one that is printed with its own ink while a process color is one that is printed using four inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). As it stands one can have only process colors in a document produced by XeLaTeX. The spotcolor package by Jens Elstner is a tool that… Continue reading Spot colors and XeLaTeX

Firefox version 19.0 comes with an embedded PDF viewer. However, this viewer failed to properly display PDF files that have Greek text and have been prepared with XeLaTeX. I have contacted the PDF.js developers who were very helpful and suggested to install the development version: http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/getting_started/#download to solver the problem. Indeed, this version solved the… Continue reading Firefox PDF viewer

ShareLaTeX was a collaborative online LaTeX editor. It seems more and more people are getting disappointed with word processors 😉 Update: ShareLaTeX is now part of Overleaf.