The typography nazi + LaTeX

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That’s right, typography über alles. A nice article on receding hairline exposes some common typographic mistakes, and how to fix them. I was aware of some of them, and I think I know how to fix them in LaTeX:

  1. Use “ and ” for quotes, always. emacs does this automatically, if in tex mode!
  2. ‘ should do the trick, I guess.
  3. $’$ should work, probably.
  4. $\times$. As before, math comes to the rescue.
  5. $^\circ$ seems a decent choice.
  6. This is well known in LaTeX: –, —, and — produce a hyphen, n-dash, and m-dash. $-$ is the minus sign.
  7. I don’t get this point so clearly, but $17.99$ is standard math in LaTeX. $\cdot$ may be used for a centred dot.
  8. $\ldots$. Any respectable LaTeXist knows that!
  9. Ok, parentheses they are. That’s what they are called in Spanish, anyway.
  10. $\frac{1}{2}$ is a decent choice, but it seems the standard unicode character should be recognized using latin1 encoding, or surely XeTeX.

Update: at some stage, latex has begun to accept (with \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}), things like “”, ·, @ (nice for email addresses), æ (nice for CV’s); also, ¿ and 1º (Spanish). Some things like ½ are not supported, but they are in XeTeX.

6 thoughts on “The typography nazi + LaTeX”

  1. Pingback: Get your units right with LaTeX « Daniel Duque Campayo

  2. Hi!
    What if you want to write in latex an apostrophe under parentheses, i.e. (‘), as a superindex and you want them to appear with the same size?
    I’m using something like
    $A^{(}’ ^{)}$
    but this means two errors when compiling…

    Reply ↓

    • A look at The LaTeX Companion (Goossens et al) readily provides the answer:
      $ A^{(\prime)} $
      Since \prime is a “bare” prime symbol, in large size.

      Reply ↓

      • Very useful!!
        And straightforward, I should buy the book.
        Is everything in LaTex done writting “\whatyouwant”? 😉
        By the way, how can I write ‘sixty-six and ninety-nine’ quotes properly in these comments? Just don’t tell me you are using emacs!
        Thanks a lot

      • Yes, as a matter of fact, “\createnewPRLarticle” will produce a novel article which is likely to be accepted in the prestigious Physical Review Letters.
        About “”, I really don’t know, comments in wordpress look rather limited, compared to entries. E.g., they lack a preview feature. But, I’ll try some stuff with AltGr:
        «hey», col·legi, “proper quotes”.

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