1

I am puzzled by the appearance of this tiny piece of text:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
    12 to 15
\end{document}

It depends a little on the zoom level, but it's probably not just me who notices that the space between 2 and t is smaller than the space between o and 1. I know that LaTeX has monospace digits, but I was not aware that this extended beyond math mode.

Is there anything that one can do so typeset digits with a more balanced space around them?

enter image description here

enter image description here

bers
  • 5,404
  • 3
    the default math setup uses digits from the default set font so they are exactly the same in text and math. the extra space is the left sidebearing of 1 so you can preceded 1 by\kern-something` with some size to taste but it is not very automatic. the lm fonts have proportional digits, see http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/247530/difference-between-cfr-lm-and-lm-package/247543#247543 – David Carlisle Oct 20 '15 at 23:40
  • Would this \kern-something depend on the character that precedes 1, 2 etc. or could the correct value be figured out once for each digit? – bers Oct 21 '15 at 13:26
  • mostly you could just use a fixed value (to equalize the sidebrearings) although optical effects of adjacent character shapes may mean you still want to add additional inter-character kerns just as happens in normal text. – David Carlisle Oct 21 '15 at 14:15

1 Answers1

3

If Latin Modern is acceptable as a substitution for Computer Modern, you can use cfr-lm to access proportional figures as explained in the answer David linked to.

12 to 15

The tabular and proportional figures match in the case of the typewriter font since monowidth selects the mono-spaced typewriter option.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[rm={lining,proportional},sf={lining,proportional},tt={lining,tabular,monowidth}]{cfr-lm}
\begin{document}
  \begin{tabular}{ll}
    12 to 15    &   proportional\\

    {\tstyle 12 to 15}  &   tabular\\

    \textsf{12 to 15}   &   proportional\\

    \textsf{\tstyle 12 to 15}   &   tabular\\

    \texttt{12 to 15}   &   tabular\\

    \texttt{\pstyle 12 to 15}   &   proportional\\
  \end{tabular}
\end{document}
cfr
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