How to set fontsize of 14pt in article class

Question

I would like to set the fontsize of 14pt in the article class. But, using What point (pt) font size are \Large etc.?, I obtain:

Questions:

1. I am assuming that the output means that the closest font size available is 14.4pt. Why did the font size not default to 12pt or 14.4pt instead of 10pt?
2. How do I set the font size to 14.4pt. Using \documentclass[14.4pt]{article} yields identical output as above.

References:

• What point (pt) font size are \Large etc.?

Code:

\documentclass[14pt]{article}
\makeatletter
%% https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24599/4301
\newcommand\thefontsize[1]{{#1 The current font size is: \f@size pt\par}}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
%\sffamily
%\thefontsize\tiny
%\thefontsize\scriptsize
%\thefontsize\footnotesize
%\thefontsize\small
\thefontsize\normalsize
\thefontsize\large
\thefontsize\Large
\thefontsize\LARGE
\thefontsize\huge
\thefontsize\Huge
\end{document}

Answer 1

To use the article document class with a basic font size of 14pt (14.4pt for sticklers for detail), you should run

\documentclass[14pt]{extarticle}

There's also extreport and extbook. These three document classes provide the following extra font size options (other than the usual 10pt, 11pt, and 12pt, of course): 8pt, 9pt, 14pt, 17pt, and 20pt.

Answer 2

With the fontsize package you can set arbitrary sizes and adjust the line spacing accordingly.

For example, you can set \normalisze to 14.4pt with:

\usepackage[fontsize=14.4]{fontsize}

In this case the line spacing defaults to 17.28pt (= 1.2 * 14.4).

if you want to specify the line spacing (for example 16pt) you will need this other command:

\changefontsize[16]{14.4}

Finally you can see a text sample for every available size with the following command:

\printsamples{⟨baselineskip⟩}{⟨fontsize⟩}[⟨sizes⟩]

Here is a MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontsize}
  \changefontsize[16]{14.4}
  \sampletext{Lorem ipsum}
\begin{document}
\printsamples{16}{14.4}[footnotesize,smallr,normalsize,large,larger,largerr]
\end{document}