A few introductory topics in typography

This presentation will describe computerised typesetting and introduce a few topics in typography which are particularly pertinent to researchers writing papers and theses.

A PDF of the presentation is available here:  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/DTG/publications/public/jjd27/typography.pdf

Discussion

A large part of the argument presented here is taken from "Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in further information and thinking about typography. The book is very lucidly written, and discusses a wide range of topics from page layout to choice of font. Most of the style recommendations are backed up with arguments from history or from current practice in various major countries and publishing houses.

Learning LaTeX

Two (very) useful LaTeX books that will get you off the ground are:

•  The Not So Short Guide To LaTeX2e by Tobias Oetiker
•  Using Imported Graphics in LaTeX and pdfLaTeX by Keith Reckdahl

LaTeX packages

• citeref is quite useful in a PhD thesis. Citeref appends a back-reference to each entry in your bibliography with the page number on which you cited it - very useful if you subsequently need to know why you cited a particular paper.
• bussproofs is a useful package for drawing proof trees (I've attached the .sty file to this page)
• thesis.skeleton is a set of style files for an Engineering/CL thesis which have been passed around and modified through the years. This version contains Engineering Department specific declarations so you'll need to update it before you use it in the CL. (I've attached a tarball to the page)

MS Word and MathType

• For those of you interested in the Microsoft way of doing collaboration on documents, have a look at  SharePoint.
• Take a look at  http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/. They are the ones who licensed to Microsoft the Equation Editor that comes with Word. However the Equation Editor does not include the good parts that only come with the full version, i.e., this MathType.
• As it's quite cheap Win-Admin can buy it for you as long as you say from where the money should come. They can get it for you in about 2 weeks and it comes in a CD. You can also instal it in your laptop as they say in the FAQs: "...if you purchase a single-user> copy of MathType, you can install it on all of your computers (i.e., home and work) as long as you use it on only one of your computers at a time.
• With MathType editing equations in Word is easier. If you want to input them as you do in LaTeX it is also possible. You can also export them as LaTeX. Most importantly: it comes with "Euclid" fonts, designed to emulate the look of the standard ones in LaTeX. So now both the equations and the bodytext in Word can be barely indistinguishable from a document produced with LaTeX.

Kerning

Math-mode in LaTeX is designed for variables whose names are single characters rather than words. Thus, it does not kern adjacent characters or produce ligatures. This leads to particularly bad effects if you try to use a variable containing the letter f.