ETS preambles

This repository contains several preambles for LuaTeX that serve the following purposes:

• Use OpenType features and contextual tracking for advanced font declarations (such as all caps and “all small caps” in titles or labels).
• Implement the layout of Robert Bringhurst’s textbook The Elements of Typographic Style (short: ETS, hence the name of the project) by modifying parameters in Markus Kohm’s KOMA classes.¹
• Use the commercial fonts Minion Pro and Minion Math directly as OTFs.² (The fonts themselves are not part of the repository, see details below.)
• Define theorem names and command abbreviations which I regularly use.

Note that this entire project heavily uses OpenType features, and hence requires all documents to be compiled with LuaTeX (i.e. using the lualatex command).

Components

The project is split into several components, which can be used somewhat independently of each other:

OpenType font styles (otfontstyles)

This package employs fontspec and microtype to establish the following font declarations:

• \allcaps (letterspaced all caps with case and cpsp),
• \sctitle (heavily spaced small caps with c2sc in titles and headings),
• \sclabel (moderately spaced small caps with c2sc in labels), and
• \tbfigures (tabular text figures).

Moreover, we introduce the semantic command \acr for acronyms (mildly spaced small caps with c2sc). This package is used by all upcoming components.

OpenType Minion packages (otminionpro, otminionmath)

The two packages otminionpro and otminionmath implement the aforementioned commercial fonts Minion Pro and Minion Math (including optical sizes, contextual swashes, breaking the Th-ligature, and some spacing adjustments). In order to use them, you need the respective fonts files.

However, none of the following components actually relie on these specific fonts. The base package otfontstyles works well with any font that has the respective OpenType features (such as EB Garamond, see below).

Custom bibliography and theorem environments (etsbib, etsthm)

These packages contain some design choices for bibliography (extending biblatex) and theorem environments (extending amsthm), both using the font declarations from otfontstyles. The package etsthm includes cleveref and hence also loads hyperref; it therefore should be the last package to call.

Documentclasses (etsbook, etsartcl, etslttr)

These three classes establish an overall layout that is inspired by Bringhurst’s book, via KOMA-internal commands. Before using them, please note the following:

• Each of these classes requires a language option (such as ngerman or british) as an argument. They will load babel, csquotes, and isodate to get language-specific quotation styles and date formats.
• The paper format for etsbook and etsartcl can be set via paper=, the default being b5. With a5 and b5, you will get decent typeareas; any other choice will merely use the preconfigured typearea for b5 as a fallback. The default paper format for etslttr is a4 with a lot of free area.
• The class etsbook allows you to put a cover figure on the title page. This can be set using the command \coverfigure. If you do not use this command, the corresponding area is left empty.

My theorems and commands (mythms, mycmds)

The components mythms and mycmds are mere tex-files containing theorem definitions (using the styles defined in etsthm) and math commands (assuming unicode-math, which is loaded e.g. by otminionmath). They can be included by simply writing \input{mythms} or \input{mycmds}.

Installation

The easiest way is to just copy the content of the folder ./texmf directly into your local TEXMF tree, resulting in two new folders tex/latex/ets and scripts/ets. A cleaner solution is to clone the repository to your favourite directory (choose it carefully once and for all) and then link the files via stow (a tool available for any Linux system). This is done as follows (from within the repository’s main folder, assuming that $TEXMFHOME contains the path of your local TEXMF tree):

stow -t $TEXMFHOME -S texmf

If you want to remove the preambles from your TEXMF tree, just run (again from within the repository’s main folder):

stow -t $TEXMFHOME -D texmf

Instructive examples

In order to see the different components in action, and also to check whether they work properly on your system, have a look at the small examples that are contained in the folder ./examples. You should be able to compile them if:

1. you have installed the components as described before,
2. you have installed the fonts that are called (see below), and
3. you use lualatex for the compilation.

Templates and shortcuts

Even though using these preambles significantly reduces the amount of code necessary to put at the beginning of each TeX file, you might still want to have a mechanism that produces a new document containing the rough structure waiting to be filled with content (especially for letters, where you have to set several KOMA variables).

The folder ./templates addresses this requirement. Since you might want to change these templates to your needs (e.g. add your name and address in the letter template), I suggest to copy them to your local TEXMF tree³, by calling (from within the repository’s main folder):

mkdir -p $TEXMFHOME/local/templates/ets
cp templates/* $TEXMFHOME/local/templates/ets/

In order to quickly access these files, I recommend to define aliases in your .bashrc, such as

alias newbook='cp $TEXMFHOME/local/templates/ets/etsbook.tex main.tex'

and similarly newartcl and newlttr (or whichever name you prefer). If you start a new project, you just have to execute newbook from within the intended folder, and you end up having a main file to work with.

Fonts

Commercial fonts

As mentioned above, the fonts Minion Pro and Minion Math have to be purchased and installed before you will be able to use either otminionpro or otminionmath. According to the TDS convention, you should put the corresponding OTFs into the folders

$TEXMFHOME/fonts/opentype/adobe/MinionPro
$TEXMFHOME/fonts/opentype/typoma/MinionMath

The otminionpro package uses the default font style, the italic font style, and the semibold font style, all three in all four optical sizes (Caption, Regular, Subhead, and Display), i.e. twelve font styles in total. The otminionmath package uses the default font style in three optical sizes (Tiny, Caption, and Regular), and a semibold variant, i.e. four font styles in total.

One remark on the Minion Math OTFs: As discussed in this StackExchange thread, Minion Math contains a lot of pairwise kerning information; however, this data is stored under script=dflt rather than under script=math, and hence is ignored by LuaTeX. I am using a version of Minion Math where this mistake has been corrected. If you do not have this version and still want to kern properly in math mode, a workaround is described in the aforementioned thread.

Other fonts

Apart from otminionpro and otminionmath, all components can be used with arbitrary fonts. Many of my examples use EB Garamond as their main font, as it has the desired OpenType features and is available on most TeX distributions.

Finally, if you look for a monospace font that matches MinionPro, my suggestion would be to use Monaspace Xenon. Its texture healing mechanism is implemented via the OpenType feature calt, which is active per default when using \setmonofont.

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1. I shall point out that there is a rather famous package called classicthesis by André Miede and Ivo Pletikosić, which pursues a similar goal. Our documentclasses, however, are way less elaborate and essentially relie on internal KOMA options, making the code more flexible – and, hopefully, more robust. ↩︎

2. And not, as in the package minionpro by Achim Blumensath, by first converting them to Type 1 fonts. ↩︎

3. According to the TDS convention, the folder $TEXMFHOME/local is the place for files that have been modified locally. ↩︎