Width and readability

I've just switched the "theme" of this blog to a fixed width theme. As screens get wider, it can be awkward if lines of text are too long because it's too easy to lose your place when your eyes flick back to find the start of the next line.

Related odd thought: I remember reading (I forget where -- I think somewhere in the documentation for the LaTeX publishing system) that the Times font was designed specifically for narrow columns of text, as you get in the Times newspaper, and there was a warning that it could look awkward for documents with much wider single-column formats. However, it's been the default in Word for a decade (though they changed it in Word 2007), and probably most of the documents any of us have printed have used it, without it seeming awkward. Anything else looks unusual. So does that mean that the warning was wrong, or just that we've got so used to it we don't notice any more?

LaTeX, monospace, bold, computer modern, bera

This isn't exactly "general interest", but if any other person trying to format their thesis has hit the same issue, it's useful to have this up there for Google to pick it up:

I've just been reformatting my PhD thesis (approved and graduated last year) as a technical report for the Computer Laboratory.  It's formatted in LaTeX, which is the typesetting system lots of computer science graduate students still use rather than stretchy rubber. If you use the Times font package, you might find that its monospaced font (something a bit like Courier) is rather wide, and looks very odd if you put a keyword in monospace in the middle of some Times prose.  The Computer Modern monospace font is a much less clashing size, much narrower than the other monospaced fonts I could find, and so that's what I used in my PhD when I printed it for submission.  Only it doesn't have a bold.  There's a trick on the Internet to put a bold monospace (typewriter) Computer Modern font in – but it's only good for print documents because it ends up being a bitmap font (looks blurry in most PDF viewers when viewed at the wrong size on the screen).  So, no good for the PDF technical report.

After some hunting around – Latin Modern is very similar to Computer Modern and does have a bold typewriter font – but not a bold italic monospace font – so bold italic ends up looking odd compared to not-bold italic.

After more searching around, a solution.  The Bera (Bitstream Vera) package has a small note in its documentation, in a file called bera.txt, saying: 

\usepackage[scaled]{...}    selects a default scaling of 90%, which makes the Bera fonts approximately match the size of the Computer Modern fonts.

(Actually I find scaled=0.88 fits better with surrounding Times text)

In otherwords, if you do \usepackage[scaled]{beramono} you'll have a monospace font that doesn't jar quite so much with surrounding Times text, and does have bold and bold italics, etc.

Oh, theres also a note saying Bera only works with T1 encoding, so you need:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{textcomp}

as well (I put it before the \usepackage[scaled=0.88]{beramono}.