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When using the pgothic package, how can I make the Gothic x look more like the 24th letter of the English alphabet instead of a handwritten lower-case z?

MWE:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{pgothic}


\begin{document}


{\pgothfamily M a x i m}% Looks like M a z i m


\end{document}

Output:

enter image description here

Werner
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DDS
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    character shapes are really a font choice not something you can control with TeX so the standard answer would be "pick a different font" I think. – David Carlisle Aug 10 '21 at 18:31
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    Related question: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/320403/how-do-i-typeset-a-fraktur-x-that-looks-like-r. You're trying to fight the tide of prior typographic history – Steven B. Segletes Aug 10 '21 at 18:43
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    I took the liberty of cleaning up your question, using only necessary content to replicate the issue. No need for font size ([12pt]) or weight (\textbf) changes, vertical skips (\vskip) nor paragraph indentation removal (\noindent). – Werner Aug 10 '21 at 18:51
  • @Werner Many thanks. I should have been more careful. – DDS Aug 10 '21 at 19:19
  • @Steven B. Segletes Thank you for pointing out the link. – DDS Aug 10 '21 at 19:20

3 Answers3

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The pgothic package provides fonts that use the same character shapes as the Gothic Textura Prescius bookhand used from the 13th century onwards.

If you don't like the look of the X, complain to the 13th century scribes. If you don't like the overall look of the font or it doesn't match the style date of your document, don't use it.

--- GOM

Peter Wilson
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The short -- but I believe, correct -- answer is: you don't.

Blackletter typefaces are fundamentally different from Latin typefaces, and you should not try to apply Latin conventions to blackletter typefaces. This is just how the lower case 'x' typically looks in blackletter typefaces.

Jakob Hampel
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  • And further, X and Z are quite different in Fraktur styles: . Any resemblance to any other style is moot. In Cyrillic, Лондон spells London, so one could approach the letter shapes algebraically, Let н = n. Я is another one that befuddles Latin-letter users, the name Катя (Katya, Katia) in italics is: Катя. Confusing, no? – Cicada Aug 11 '21 at 16:26
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With old-fashioned font packages, you don’t have much of an alternative but to substitute a different font, such as one of the blacklettert1 fonts. You could perhaps define an 8-bit virtual font.

In the modern toolchain, with fontspec, you can choose a blackletter font with character variants and stylistic sets, such as Unifraktur Maguntia.

You don’t seem to be using this as a math symbol, but unicode-math does have a range= command to load \mathfrak{x} from a different font.

Davislor
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