PCTeX Talk
Discussions on TeX, LaTeX, fonts, and typesetting

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Joined: 06 Oct 2005
Posts: 84
Location: San Francisco, CA

Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 12:33 pm    Post subject: MTPro2 fonts wider than AMS and mathptmx fonts

[A MTPro2 user wrote:]

After comparing MTPro2 Lite with some other fonts, we found that the math
equations using MTPro2 Lite are not as compact as the default fonts of
AMSLaTeX and the mathptmx fonts. In most cases the equations' length using
MTpro2 is longer than using mathptmx or AMSLaTeX. For example,
 Code: $\hat f_{*}$
the distance between f and * is quite different between MTpro2 and
mathptmx. It causes lots of work to revise our existing LaTeX files, which
work fine with mathptmx.

Could you tell me if there is any way to make equations compact with MTPro2 Lite fonts?
Michael Spivak

Joined: 10 Oct 2005
Posts: 52

Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 1:26 pm    Post subject: Re: MTPro2 fonts wider than AMS and mathptmx fonts

[A MTPro2 user wrote:]

After comparing MTPro2 Lite with some other fonts, we found that the math
equations using MTPro2 Lite are not as compact as the default fonts of
AMSLaTeX and the mathptmx fonts. In most cases the equations' length using
MTpro2 is longer than using mathptmx or AMSLaTeX. For example,
 Code: $\hat f_{*}$
the distance between f and * is quite different between MTpro2 and
mathptmx. It causes lots of work to revise our existing LaTeX files, which
work fine with mathptmx.

Could you tell me if there is any way to make equations compact with MTPro2 Lite fonts?

"any way to make equations compact with MTPro2 Lite fonts" is a pretty ambiguous phrase! I presume AMSLaTeX means with Computer Modern fonts, and I don't have mathptmx fonts, and you give only the one example of \hat f_{*}. When I compare the Compter Modern and MTPro2 output I would say that the distance between the f and the * is
SMALLER in MTPro2 than in Computer Modern---note that the top bulb of the f reaches almost over half of the * in MTPro2 while in the case of Computer Modern it is completely to the left of it. The real difference here is that the Times italic f has a nice slant to it, while the Computer Modern math italic f has been scrunched up, so the Times italic f is much wider (reflected in the fact that the MTPro2 fonts need MANY more kerns than the Computer Modern math fonts, to improve spacing between letters).

I realize that it can be a pain to change already typeset work in one font to another font, but I'm not sure that in the case of fonts, incumbents should be given automatic advantages---just look what that has done in politics!

There are various things that you could try if you simply must have more compact equations. For one thing, you could change the values of \thinmuskip, etc. (see page 168 of The TeXbook) so that there is less space around binary relations and relations. More radically, I believe that dvips allows you to load compressed fonts, that is, you can load fonts
whose widths are, say, only 95% of their standard widths. This (together with changing the values of \thinmuskip, etc. to 95% of their current values) would compress all the MTPro2 equations to 95% of their lengths.
Of course, then you'd have to change the style file to reference these compressed fonts rather than the normal ones; I presume this is something that some one familiar with LaTeX could do easily.
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