[texhax] How can I "condense" or "narrow" an existing font? -- solution
Niall Mansfield
texhax at uit.co.uk
Tue Feb 12 17:54:00 CET 2008
On 22-Feb-2007, 17:30, Niall Mansfield wrote:
> Subject: How can I "condense" or "narrow" an existing font?
> I am typesetting material that contains many code examples
> and program output listings, some of which are very wide.
> I have to use a monospaced font.
>
> If I just reduce the text size, it becomes almost unreadable,
> and anyway the main problem is the width, not the length.
>
> 1. Can I somehow transform the standard courier font so that it
> is say, X percent narrower, without reducing its height?
You *can* take an existing PostScript font, and define a
modified variant of it which is condensed (i.e. narrower)
or expanded (wider).
To do this, you install your modified font as a new one,
with two crucial changes:
1. When you run afm2tfm to produce the TeX font metric
for your new file, specify argument -e 0.6 (to condense
each character to 60% of its normal width).
2. In the .map file, specify the same value, followed by "ExtendFont".
E.g. for a condensed version of OCR-B, we created
the file pob.map, containing the single line:
pobr OCRB " TeXBase1Encoding ReEncodeFont 0.6 ExtendFont " <8r.enc <ob______.pfb
(We used OCRB because it was the only not-part-of-a-distribution
PostScript font that was to hand, so we could be sure it didn't
interfere with anything else.)
(You can also slant an existing font -- by using SlantFont instead of
ExtendFont -- though that wasn't relevant for us.)
For full details of how to install a new PostScript font, see:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/beginlatex/html/chapter8.html
Formatting information
A beginner's introduction to typesetting with LATEX
Chapter 8 — Fonts and layouts
Peter Flynn
http://www.tug.org/texinfohtml/dvips.html#Virtual-fonts
See section "6 PostScript fonts" for a good overview
of the various pieces steps and how they fit together.
Enjoy!
Niall
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