[PRL] mathpazo??

[Richard Cobbe]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 11:37:37AM -0500, Mitchell Wand wrote:
> Right now I'm using the "palatino" package for EOPL3 and for my lecture 
> notes.  It looks pretty good, but  the Greek letters in the formulas 
> don't scale quite right.
> 
> LaTeX Companion 2ed (p. 371) says that the palatino package is obsolete, 
> and has been superceded by something called "mathpazo" that gives better 
> math fonts.

...among several other advantages.

If, btw, you want Courier and Helvetica as your monospaced and sans
serif fonts, mathpazo will no longer do this for you, and there are a
couple of arcane incantations you have to mumble at LaTeX to get that to
look good; I can send you a pointer if you're interested.

> Although this has been around since 2000, it does not appear to be in 
> our standard Unix image :(.

That's because, IIRC, the TeX install on the CCS network dates back to
at least 1999.  As you say, :(.

> Does anybody around here
> 
>   a) have a copy of Latex that has this package, so I can see whether 
> it's better? or

Yes -- I got fed up with Systems' teTeX installation being so out of
date, so I built my own.  Binaries are in /scratch/cobbe/usr/bin, and
this should work more or less out of the box.  Holler if you have
problems.

I would also expect that any halfway-decent TeX bundle for Windows built
within the last 4 years or so should have this stuff built in, so you
could investigate that route as well.

>   b) know how to install this on the Unix image (preferably without 
> asking Systems)?

Installing packages with fonts, especially postscript fonts, is tricky
under the best of circumstances.  Additionally, Systems' build of TeX is
configured to make this as hard as possible.  :-(

Richard