The concmath package

The concmath package for LTEX 2ε provides access to the Concrete Math fonts that were derived from the Concrete Roman fonts designed by Don Knuth [1, 2]. While the Concrete Roman fonts were originally developed as a text fonts to be used in combination with the AMS Euler fonts in math mode, the Concrete Math fonts provides a complementary set of math fonts, so that the Concrete typefaces may be used as a complete replacement for Computer Modern [3]. Loading the concmath package without any options has the effect of switching the default text font family to Concrete Roman and redeclaring the default math symbol fonts and math alphabets to use Concrete Math. In addition, the concmath package also provides the following package options that may be used to activate some extra features: The ‘exscale’ option: This option provides the functionality of the ‘exscale’ package from the LTEX base distribution, but using scaled sizes of the Concrete version of the math extension font instead of Computer Modern. The ‘amsfonts’ and ‘amssymb’ options: These options provide the functionality of the standard ‘amsfonts’ and ‘amssymb’ packages, but using the Concrete versions of the AMS symbol fonts and math alphabets. The ‘sansbold’ option: This option redefines the default bold series to use semibold condensed, thereby replacing the bold extended version of Computer Modern Roman by the semibold condensed version of Computer Modern Sans Serif in bold material such as titles and section headings. Since there are different opinions among package writers as to which of these choices is better suited for use in combination with Concrete Roman, both have been used in various LTEX packages [4, 5, 6] and both are supported in this package as well. Before we eventually get to the implementation of the concmath package and the corresponding font definition files, we shall first review the history of the Concrete Roman and Concrete Math font families. In particular, we shall discuss the procedure how the Concrete Math fonts were derived from the Concrete Roman fonts by applying systematic changes to the METAFONT parameter files.