Hi all, I'm writing a couple books destined to be eBooks and nothing else, so I want bigger than a 12pt font, and I understand the way to do that is with the extsizes package, which I already have installed and texhashed.
For most books I like to make a layout derived the Book document class, so now that I can use 17 point (or maybe only 14 pt), I wanted to derive it from the extbook document class. I did NOT want to go and use something like Koma -- my belief is that switching document classes every time you want a different feature is walking the road to ruin. But it was not at all obvious how to make a layout based on extsizes.cls, that would both reveal all font sizes in the LyX environment, and compile to a PDF. Finally, after searching the web, I just imitated Herbert Voss' extbook layout: http://fossies.org/unix/misc/lyx-2.0.4.tar.gz:a/lyx-2.0.4/lib/layouts/extbook.layout My derivation line (the comment that's line #2 in the layout file) looked like this: # \DeclareLaTeXClass[extbook]{tp_book} The tp_book class is what shows up in the document class list. Then, a few lines down, where the Global Parameters are listed, I added these three lines: ClassOptions FontSize 8|9|10|11|12|14|17|20 end After running LyX and doing Tools->Reconfigure, I was able to select 20pt as the base size, recompile to PDF, and everything worked perfectly. Wellllll, almost perfectly. The default Roman font looked stringy at 20pt -- ugly as sin. Same for Computer Modern Roman, Latin Modern Roman, AE Almost European. Century Schoolbook was much better, but looked a little too bold and blocky at 20pt. Times Roman looked pretty good. Palatino was good and solid, but looked a little funky. Bitstream Charter looked good. Bookman wasn't as stringy as default, but a little too reedy, and the individual letters were too wide. Utopia looked excellent at 20pt. Between these fonts, I think it will be a coin toss between Century Schoolbook and Utopia. I'd like to figure out how to get Liberation Serif, Liberation Sans, and Liberation Mono into LyX, as these exactly mimic Windows TruType Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New fonts, and I think I'll have less legal ramifications for embedding in the PDF than would other fonts. But of course, I'll need to learn how to incorporate the Liberation fonts into LyX. Anyway, if anyone wants to use larger base fonts with a layout file derived from extbook.cls, which is basically the Book class with some bigger sizes, this is how you do it. SteveT Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance
