• My book: Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences (Wiley; Amazon).
• 111th U.S. Senate ideal point estimates:
  • PDF, CSV last updated February 06 2010
• 111th U.S. House ideal point estimates:
  • PDF, CSV, last updated February 05 2010
  • scatterplot vs Obama vote share PDF SVG
• Next Australian election, Centrebet prob. of ALP win: 0.78 (2010-02-10, time-series)

A recent e-mail correspondent writes:

I have a degree in applied statistics, and I’m really interested in the lectures notes you put on your website about Bayesian approaches and simulations. That’s something i need to discover and it looks really rich and interesting. I also use R on a very regular basis.

The purpose of this email is that I’m using LaTeX to write some documents, and i can’t find anything on how to install the FF Meta police, which is very clear and easy to read.
Have you anything about that by any chance?

First of all, I should take the Bayes notes down and point you in the direction of The Book (done!).

On FFMeta, I don’t quite get the references to “FF Meta police”. But here is how I did it (below the fold).

Some graphic design friends in Sydney suggested Meta to me a while ago. I was looking for something that would distinguish my papers from the lovely but ubiquitous Computer Modern, that wasn’t Times + mtimes etc (which I’ve come to appreciate more and more, btw, perhaps since my book was set in Times etc), something that was “modern” but not so starkly sans-serif as to degrade readability.

I was originally playing with Gill Sans, which does have a Greek character set. But (a) graphic designer friends thought it a bit lame; (b) it is lovely for signage (“Signs on the wall identify this as Euston in a tasteful sans-serif that screams official credibility” wrote Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon), but not great in gobs and gobs of text. Students would also complain about its starkness in lecture slides: upper-case “I” is what, exactly (lower-case el, the numeral one, a vertical bar, or upper-case eye…).

So FFMeta seemed like a good solution: a hint of a serif, works well at different sizes. If I were to do it again, I’d think also about Whitney by Tobias Frere-Jones, or the Futura-ish look of Verlag. National looks like a lovely typeface as well, a Grotesk-ish sans that could work for both headers and text (then again, I have days when I think everything should be in Didot.

The downside was that Meta didn’t come with an extended set of “expert” glyphs or Greek characters (at least none that I could find). So I use Gill Sans Greek (actually Monotype GillSansDualGreekMT) for my Greek characters (except lower case \alpha and \chi, which I never liked the look of in Gill Sans Greek, substituting the Euler \alpha that ships with most tex distributions). I use as many symbols from Meta as I can, to keep the look and kerning standard (e.g., \neq, \leq, \infty, \pm \times) , but with default is to fall back on Computer Modern for symbols (e.g., \partial, \int, \forall). I never got this perfect, but its good enough.

When you get new typefaces, they often come as AFM files (Adobe Font Metrics) or TTF (TrueType). [Update: or OTF these days]. I got 24 AFM files when I purchased FFMeta. To use them in LaTeX you have to convert all of them (or the ones you want to use) to TFM (TeX font metrics), and specify an encoding (e.g., 8r, the TeX Base 1 Encoding); use the afm2tfm utility that comes with your tex distribution (part of the dvips side of things). The “-v” option will produce a VPL (virtual property list) so you can create “virtual fonts”. It has been a while since I’ve done this, and you can also use afm2pl utility to convert the AFM file to the a “property list” PL file, then pltotf to get the TFM files, and vpl2vpl and vptovf to get the VPL.

All that is complicated. fontinst attempts to automate the process. I’ve never used it, and I end up writing scripts like this. You probably want to look at Fontforge too.

LaTeX needs font definition files, which tell LaTeX which TFM file it should use when it encounters things like \emph{} and \bold{} or \textsc{} etc; here is mine, for my FFMeta setup. pdfLaTeX/dvips also need a map file, telling them how to map from TFMs to actual fonts to be included in the Postscript or PDF file (pfb files); here is my meta.map file (which won’t display properly in a browser window).

You need to keep your wits about you with naming schemes for fonts (TeX is unforgiving about this), where you put all these files when you are done, and finally (a) making TeX aware that you have new fonts to use, and (b) writing a .sty file that gives you access to the new fonts from inside your LaTeX document. It is inside that .sty file (in my case, meta.sty) that I have all the other hacks that define other characters and things. Put it all together and you get this (made from this).

Resources: this page is pretty good if you are in the Mac world. I also learned a lot from TeX Unbound by Alan Hoenig, but that book could be out of date by now, I don’t know.

Update: see comment #1. Forget all the scripting and carry-on above. Go use xelatex. Its only 5 years old (where have I been?!), and it certainly takes the pain out of switching fonts…

As per comment #1: use it with Will Roberston’s fontspec and unicode-math. Stop before 4am in the morning…your family will thank you.

Good Lord how did I miss this?