[texhax] description of text in {\tt }
Pierre MacKay
pierre.mackay at comcast.net
Wed Jan 28 07:19:07 CET 2009
I am in complete agreement with reinhard, both about the needless use of
typewriter fonts and about the avoidance of Times Roman in places where
it doesn't belong. (A very minor point, though---what Stanley Morison
released to the world in the 1930s was Times Roman. Times New Roman is
a relatively recent update.)
But I am puzzled by the statement that it is impossible to hyphenate
typewriter fonts. Here is what I get in plain TeX.
*\tentt
*\showthe\font
> \tentt .
<recently read> \font
*\showhyphens{hyphenation}
Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) detected at line 0
[] \tenrm hy-phen-ation
*\showthe\font
> \tentt .
<recently read> \font
which woud seem to indicate that \tentt has no trouble with hyphenation.
I could turn it off by setting the \hyphenchar for \tentt to -1, or I
could set \lefthyphenmin to 10000 in any \tt environment, but the
default appears to be to permit hyphenation in a \tentt environment.
That said, by all means follow Reinhard's advice and use Charter, or
Palatino, or Computer Modern for letters rather than typewriter font.
If you really need a monospaced font, dear old Courier is still a
reliable resource.
Pierre MacKay
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