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              Using the Bera fonts with LaTeX
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                                                  2004-09-07
                                              Walter Schmidt
                                         w.a.schmidt@gmx.net
                                         
"Bera" is a set of three PostScript Type1 font families:
Bera Serif (a slab-serif Roman), Bera Sans (a "Frutiger
descendant") and Bera Mono (monospaced/typewriter).


USING SINGLE FONT FAMILIES

Several macro packages are provided to use these font
families with LaTeX:

package:  effect:    
------------------------------------------------------------
beraserif selects Bera Serif as the default roman family
berasans  selects Bera Sans as the default sansserif family
beramono  selects Bera Mono as the default typewriter family

You need not necessarily use all three font families
together (even though this is supported, see below).  
Bera Sans blends well with many roman typefaces, as long as
their x-height is not too low.  Bera Mono is a versatile
"all-purpose" monospaced typeface, whose advantage over
CM-Typewriter is the availability of a bold font series.

Notice that the Bera fonts are supported with T1 (european)
and TS1 (textcompanion) encoding only, so you should issue
the commands

  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  \usepackage{textcomp}

in the document preamble.  The obsolete OT1 encoding, which
is still the default with LaTeX, is _not_ supported.

The Bera fonts are much larger than many others, when used
at the same nominal size.  This can be fixed by loading the
above package so with the option [scaled=...].  For
instance,

  \usepackage[scaled=0.95]{berasans}
  
loads the Bera Sans fonts, scaled down to 95% of their 
"natural" size.  Omitting the factor, i.e.,

  \usepackage[scaled]{...}
  
selects a default scaling of 90%, which makes the Bera fonts
approximately match the size of the Computer Modern fonts.


USING THE BERA FONT FAMILIES TOGETHER

To make the use of the three Bera fonts families together
most easy, a further macro package bera.sty is provided:

  \usepackage{bera}

effects all of the following:

* T1 and textcompanion encoding is selected

* Bera Roman, Sans and Mono at 90% are loaded as the three 
  main text font families (while the math fonts remain 
  unchanged!)
  
* the line spacing is enlarged by 5%, i.e.,
  \linespread{1.05}, with respect to the large x-height of
  the Bera typefaces;
  
* the definitions of the TeX and LaTeX logos \TeX and \LaTeX
  are changed so as to suit BeraSerif.
  
Even though there are no math fonts that were designed
particularly to go with Bera Serif, math typesetting is
possible.  It is recommended to use the the math fonts of
Y&Y's Lucida font set <http://www.yandy.com/lucida.htm>,
which blend surprisingly well with Bera.  Notice that the
Lucida math fonts are to be scaled correspondingly:

  \usepackage{bera}
  \usepackage[expert]{lucbmath}
  \def\DeclareLucidaFontShape#1#2#3#4#5#6{%
    \DeclareFontShape{#1}{#2}{#3}{#4}{<->s*[0.90]#5}{#6}}
   



NFSS CLASSIFICATION

encodings  family  series  shape(s)  Postscript font name
---------------------------------------------------------
T1, TS1    fve     m       n, sl(*)  BeraSerif-Roman
T1, TS1    fve     b       n, sl(*)  BeraSerif-Bold
T1, TS1    fvs     m       n, sl     BeraSans-Roman
                                     BeraSans-Oblique
T1, TS1    fvs     b       n, sl     BeraSans-Bold
                                     BeraSans-BoldOblique
T1, TS1    fvm     m       n, sl     BeraSansMono-Roman
                                     BeraSansMono-Oblique
T1, TS1    fvm     b       n, sl     BeraSansMono-Bold
                                     BeraSansMono-BoldOb

(*) The slanted series of the Bera Serif fonts are 
artificially slanted; there are no correspoding real fonts.

In the TS1 encoding only the characters of the ISO-Adobe
character set plus the Euro (\texteuro) and the Omega
(\textomega) are available.


== finis
