Arev Sans for TEX and LTEX

Bitstream Vera was designed by Jim Lyles of Bitstream, Inc., in cooperation with the Gnome Foundation as a high quality scalable free font for use with free open-source software [4]. The Bitstream Vera family includes serif, sans serif, and monospaced fonts,1 and all three fonts have normal, oblique, bold, and bold oblique faces. Bitstream Vera is primarily intended as a screen font (though it also works well as a print font) and has hinting for display on low-resolution devices such as computer monitors and projectors. All three fonts have large x height, wide letters and spacing, and “open” letters,2 resulting in fonts that are extremely easy to read at small sizes or on projected displays. Tavmjong Bah created Arev Sans3 by extending Bitstream Vera Sans to include Greek, Cyrillic, and many mathematical symbols [1]. The new glyphs added by Bah accurately capture the feel of the Latin letters and so seamlessly integrate into the font. Bah’s intention was to add symbols that are useful for technical writing, and hence the Greek letters are typical of those used in mathematics and science and not of the letters used in writing the Greek language.4 At the author’s request, Bah also added several alternate glyphs for some of the Latin and Greek letters. This was mainly done so that all of the letters can be clearly distinguished when in mathematics and not surrounded by other letters or even aligned with the baseline.5 Additionally, several alternate glyphs were added that are “warmer” or more “humanist” than the strict “geometric” glyphs.6 These extra glyphs add a degree of warmth to mathematics written in Arev Sans that is not achieved with other sans serif fonts. Figure 1 shows a sample of Arev Sans being used for text and mathematics. The primary use that the author sees for Arev Sans in LATEX is for presentations, and especially for those that are displayed with a computer projector. The attributes of Bitstream Vera and Arev mentioned above make Arev particularly suited for this purpose. Besides Arev, there are only a few other options for sans serif fonts in LATEX, and none of them are entirely satisfactory. Computer Modern sans serif and the SliTEX sans serif7 fonts can be used for text, but Computer Modern roman is still used for mathematics. Walter Schmidt’s Computer Modern Bright8 (cmbright[5]) is a sans serif family that includes both text and ∗email : lastname at gmail dot com. 1The text of this document is set in Bera Serif and Mono [3], a repackaging of Bitstream Vera for TEX. 2For instance, compare the lowercase “e” of Arev Sans with that of Helvetica. 3Per the license for Bitstream Vera, any derivative fonts must have a different name. 4Specifically, alpha is not the same as lowercase “a,” nu is not the same as lowercase “v,” and Upsilon is not the same as uppercase “Y.” 5The lowercase “l” and the uppercase “I” in particular are almost identical in Bitstream Vera Sans. The lowercase phi and original uppercase Phi in Arev Sans are also difficult to distinguish without a baseline. 6The extra glyphs include “a,” “i,” “l,” “u,” “v,” “w,” “x,” and uppercase Gamma, Pi, Xi, Sigma, and Phi. The florin is used as an alternate “f.” 7Arev Sans is actually very similar to SliTEX sans serif (lcmss) in that both have large x height, have wide letters and spacing, and have “open” letters. Arev Sans is heavier than SliTEX sans serif though, which makes it more suitable for computer projectors. 8Harald Halders created Type 1 Postcript font versions of the cmbright fonts called hfbright. The fonts were created by tracing high resolution bitmaps, and so are not perfect. However, scalable Type 1 fonts greatly improve the quality of Postscript