Hi
I've started using LaTeX recently -- I've two issues here. The document printed is very very light. And the font is smaller than normal. I use 12, but still if I can bring that up 13 or 14 it could be more useful. How can I rectify the situation? Any help or pointers in this regard is much appreciated. Thank you.

cheers
gwaihir

I have no lightness issues here, so I'm not sure why it's happening to you. For the size, you can do something in the documentclass like:

\documentclass[letterpaper,10pt]

Hope that helps.

Thanks for answering Chun-Yu. I use 12pt (\documentclass[12pt]) but I still find the document wee bit tiny than what I'm expecting. And yes, document does come out to be light. Again, I need it to be dark only slightly.

Hmmm...just wondering -- I don't have a printer at home. And I go out to take the printout. The printer is a laser printer. Now, is there any chance that the print quality setting is set low?

Hmm, could be the print quality. Can you view the output (DVI/PS/PDF) after running latex on the .tex file? If you can, does it appear light on-screen?

OK...here's what I found...Acrobat Reader 5 displayed the file lightly while 6 displayed it as I wanted it to -- but, in 6 I have configured in the Preferences for such a display. But Yap displayed it fine by default.

Is there a way to use size 13 /14 for fonts?

The lightness is probably a result of the anti-aliasing used.

As for font size, can't you set it to 13 or 14pt in the document class?

Regarding lightness, yes, you have struck the correct word. The way I see it, it looks better -- how do I achieve such a look in the printout? Is there a way to manually set the DPI info? And the unaliased(?!) look under Acrobat Reader 5.0 is how I currently see my printed docs...

If I set it that way, although pdfTeX doesn't complain, it simply loads the size 10 font.

I'm using MiKTeX 2.4.1399 (the full package option) if that's of any use...

edit : Just noticed that this is my 50th post here...hurrah to myself.

Anti-aliasing is only used to make fonts look smoother on display but it's not necessary on print-outs since when using good printers like laser printers, the fonts are usually already smooth (assuming you are using a truetype font, rather than bitmap).

For those who use ps2pdf, sometimes they'll observe the fonts in their PDFs to be bitmapped and just plain....yucky. That's because they haven't embedded the fonts in the postscript file so Acrobat displays bitmapped fonts, whick look yucky but print out ok. The way to embed fonts into the PS file is added a few extra commands to dvips

dvips -Ppdf -G0 document.dvi

The -G0 (it's a zero) is needed on some versions of MikTeX.

But you said you were using pdfTeX so all of the above doesn't apply. But you could try doing the TeX => PS => PDF conversion and see if you like the result, I guess.

I have tried that too -- it looks bad on the screen but haven't tried taking a printout. Anyway, , means the issue has to be settled at the printer end. I'll look into it and see how it works out. Should I check the DPI settings? What's the recommended value for a very very good looking printout?

Regarding the font size, perhaps TeX command \magnification could solve the issue. But pdfTeX complains. How do I use pure TeX commands? Or is there another equivalent command available?

I'm using WinEdt under windows -- are there any similar frontends available for Linux?

hmmm....depends on your printer. The laser printer we have here prints at 1200 dpi.



You could use \large or \Large though I've never tried it as I haven't had font size problems (yet). The only problems I've had are fonts being too big in tables (in two-column format) so I've used \footnotesize or \script to make them smaller.



Under windows, you should consider using TeXnicCenter. It's free!! Just google for it.
In Linux, I use Kile. Kile is like TeXnicCenter but not as good, in my opinion.

Both look very good. Thanks for pointng out.

cheers
naren