[texhax] Non-proportional font availability

[John R. Culleton]

On Monday 07 August 2006 13:38, hgi at shaw.ca wrote:
> Hi All!
>
> I now have a nice, in-house, two-column newsletter that our branch uses to
> generate awareness in other branches.  It goes out once a month, is a
> one-pager (two sides), yet presents some useful information.
>
> I'm now setting it up so everything can be generated automatically using a
> Python program to generate the Tex (LaTex) code.
>
> My  difficulty is that I have little "title bars" in blue (with white text
> inside) just above each tiny section.  So it would be great, when titles
> are entered, to know that a titlebar is say, 50 characters in width and
> since the heading itself is (for example) 30 chars in width, I need to pad
> 20 characters with the blue colour.  In this way all titlebars are exactly
> the same width, regardless of how much text they contain.
>
> So I am wondering if there is a fairly nice looking font that I might
> access for titles, that is likely non-proportional, so I can dynamically
> create equal-width titlebars throughout my little document.
>
> Thanks so much!
>
> -Warren

Perhaps it would be easier to just center the text in a fixed
length bar, rather than counting spaces.  

It is not difficult to set up a title bar as an hbox to a given
width and center the text with \hfil within the box. Getting
different color text is pretty easy too. Haven't figured out the blue
background yet. Here is what I have thus far:

\pdfoutput 1
\input pdfcolor.tex
%the above would be different for LaTeX

\hbox to 1in{\Blue \hfil Short text\hfil}
\vskip 10pt

\hbox to 1in{\Blue \hfil Longer  text\hfil}
\bye

Of course this gives blue text on a white background. You want the
reverse. But at least I have provided a fixed length
bar with variable text inside of it. Someone else can figure out
the backgrojnd color scheme. I can do it in Context but not in LaTeX, 
which I seldom use.

A nice tool for newsletters etc. is Scribus. You can use one of
the newsletter tamplates and flow in the articles. 

-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexing and Typesetting
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