[texhax] Latin modern typewriter font and single quotes

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Sat Jan 5 00:42:52 CET 2008


James Smith writes:
 > Hey,
 > 
 > I was advised to use LModern a few months back and I'm happy with it
 > apart from, in my verbatims, the single quote character, which normally
 > in typewriter fonts comes out as a vertical dash, comes out as a
 > `floating comma', if you see what I mean.

Single quote characters are always a problem if you want to typeset
computer code.  It is absolutely necessary that /quoteleft and
/quoteright can be distinguished easily.  This is not always the case
because font designers often prefer "typographic quotes" which are
actually commas.

I don't know whether Jacko, the father of lmodern is on this list, so
I added him to the CC.  The lack of cleary distinguishable (also at
low resolution) single quotes is a pity.  Jacko, is it possible to
create such glyphs halfways easily?  I always considered to make Latin
Modern Teletype as a default font for my xterms and for Emacs but I
hesitated because it's currently very difficult to distinguish between
/quoteleft and /quoteright.

 > Is there a workaround, or will I have to find another font for my
 > verbatims?

Unfortunately there are not many typewriter fonts available at all.
And there is nothing better today than Latin Modern.

There are several variants of "Courier" available.  But see:

  http://ms25.ath.cx/courier.pdf

URW Courier (red) is compared with IBM Courier donated to X11 (blue).
This looks like a joke but it's real life.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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