TeXShop 3.39 e i font

Non scrivo per lamentarmi che Koch, oltre ad aver adottato [tt]latin9[/tt] come codifica di default in uno sprazzo di illuminata lungimiranza, ha deciso di non migliorare più la versione 2.* del programma. No, non scrivo per questo.
E nemmeno per lamentarmi che TeXShop non ha il sistema delle linguette per aprire più file in una sola finestra.
Nemmeno per lamentarmi che TeXShop non permette di comporre solo una selezione del sorgente.
Meno che mai per lamentarmi che Biber non è ancora il motore bibliografico predefinito e che è vero, sì, che lo si può impostare, ma anche quando lo imposto il pulsante si chiama sempre BibTeX e che ci vuole a fare un pulsante nuovo.

Scrivo perché nel mio vorrei ma non posso un nuovo Mac con Mavericks per godere delle migliorie di alcuni programmi ho letto questo, a proposito dei miglioramenti contenuti nella versione 3.39 del miglior editor LaTeX in circolazione 🙂

The most significant change in 3.39 is the addition of Michael Sharpe’s “Recent TeX Fonts” document and associated font Macros. Michael and I attended the TeX User Group meeting in Portland, Oregon at the end of July, 2014. I knew him as an Applescript expert; several of his scripts are in TeXShop. Other macros from him will appear in a future version. To see his scripts, go to https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3825336/TeX/index.html. Pay particular attention to macrocopier.zip on this location, a stand alone program which makes it easy to maintain and extend TeXShop macros.
At the TUG meeting, I discovered that Sharpe is a font expert widely known to users on other platforms. TeX Live contains a very large number of TeX fonts, but it is not that easy to use them. Most font sets don’t have mathematical symbols, and it becomes a design task to find pleasing combinations of fonts for text, sans-serif sections, and mathematics.

Sharpe wrote a document called “Recent TeX Fonts”, now available in the TeXShop Help menu. This document describes a number of pleasing font combinations, one per page. Each page lists the features of a set, provides an extensive sample of text and mathematics typeset using it, and contains the exact LaTeX code needed to use the font set. These sets are the result of extensive work by Sharpe; I understand that some of them took four months to perfect.

One way to use the document is to select an article or book written with standard fonts and copy Sharpe’s implementation section into the document’s header and retypeset.

To make this even easier, Sharpe slightly modified the LaTeX template which comes with TeXShop, defining a section in the header bounded by %SetFonts comments. The space between two such comments can be empty when the document is originally written. Sharpe defined three macros called “GetFontSet,” “SaveFontSet,” and “TestFontSet.” The first of these brings up a small dialog listing known font sets. When one is selected, its implementation code is written to the source document between the %SetFonts comments, replacing other implementation code there. So with one click and one typeset, the document can be seen written with a new set of fonts.

Users can also put their own implementation code between the %SetFonts comments. The SaveFontSet macro reaches between the comments and saves the implementation code to a file in ~/Library/TeXShop/bin named “SetFonts”, which is used by the GetFontSet macro to list known font combinations. Thus “SetFonts” gradually builds into a library of known font combinations.

I’ll let the TestFontSet macro speak for itself.

To use these Sharpe additions, it is necessary to use the full TeX Live as installed by MacTeX, because BasicTeX doesn’t contain many fonts. All the font sets defined by Sharpe have been tested and are available with TeX Live 2014, except two. The garamondx font has a license permitting free personal use provided the font is not sold. This font is on CTAN, but it cannot be in TeX Live because TUG sells a DVD containing TeX Live. However, a script named getnonfreefonts is available to download and install this font. See https://www.tug.org/fonts/getnonfreefonts/.

The “SetFonts” template also has a Lucida entry. Lucida is a commercial font, sold by TUG and others. See https://www.tug.org/store/lucida/index.html. Many users own this set, and Sharpe’s detailed and non-trivial code to use them will help them obtain the most from the fonts. It is our hope that the existence of these easy techniques will lead to more LaTeX documents that don’t scream out “I was written with \TeX,” and instead have a professional printed look.

Chiedo a chi ha aggiornato TeXShop che ne pensa.

Ciao
Tommaso