From: AMS Technical Support <MJD@MATH.AMS.ORG>
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: RE: AMS-LaTeX, NFSS and font sizes (changing)
Date: 28 Sep 1992 16:19:10 -0400 (EDT)
Organization: Info-Tex<==>Comp.Text.Tex Gateway
X-Gateway-Source-Info: Mailing List

[ in reply to ]
ajr@phys.canterbury.ac.nz (Andrew Richards University of Canterbury)
> Andrew Richards
> Dept. of Physics
> University of Canterbury
> New Zealand.

Dear Professor Richards:

This is in reply to your mail of 22 Sep 1992 to the mail list info-TeX.

> Using AMS-LATEX with NFSS - changing the font size.
> ==================================================
>
> AMS-LaTeX and NFSS have recently been installed on our system
> although the benefits of using this system appear numerous I
> am have problems changing font size, for example, the following
> document produces only two font sizes: normal and large.
>
> \documentstyle{amsart}
> \begin{document}
> {\normalsize hello\\}
> {\large hello\\}
> {\Large hello\\}
> {\LARGE hello\\}
> {\huge hello\\}
> {\Huge hello\\}
> \end{document}
>
> This happens only when the standard LaTeX {article} style is
> replaced by {amsart}.
>
> The reason I need the use the {amsart} style is that it provides
> the \bold{} command in mathmode which whereas in LaTeX I had to
> \mbox{} my bold characters - thus resetting the font size.
> This means the entire document cannot be easily enlarged.

If you have AMS-LaTeX on your system then you should also be able to
find on your system the LaTeX source file for the AMS-LaTeX users'
guide: amslatex.tex. In the standard AMS-LaTeX distribution there is a
subdirectory called `doc' that contains this file and some other
more technical documentation.

But to answer your question more directly:

  \documentstyle[amsfonts]{article}

allows you to use the same font commands without going through the
amsart documentstyle.

The purpose of the amsart documentstyle is specifically to produce
printed output that matches the appearance of American Mathematical
Society journals. Font sizes larger than \large are disabled for two
reasons: (1) AMS journals never use anything larger than \large (2)
The amsart documentstyle is a memory hog and therefore every scrap of
memory that can be saved is saved (e.g., by having trivial definitions
instead of normal definitions for \Large etc.), so as to not render
the documentstyle unusable by those who have older, smaller versions
of TeX.

Individual font sizes can be accessed directly through the \fontsize
command provided by the `new font selection scheme' (NFSS). For
example,

  \fontsize{14}{16pt}\selectfont

switches to 14-point fonts with linespacing of 16 points (see nfss.tex
and amslatex.tex for further details).

In AMSLaTeX the size-changing commands \small, \normalsize, \large,
\Large, \LARGE, etc. are merely abbreviations for \fontsize commands
and all you need to know to redefine them for your own purposes is
which sizes were declared in the font definitions file that you chose
when installing AMSLaTeX (fontdef.max, fontdef.ori, fontdef.ams, etc.)
Thus you could write

  \renewcommand{\LARGE}{\fontsize{14}{16pt}\selectfont}

to override the amsart definition of \LARGE.

In addition, it is often a good idea for you to make your own custom
fontdef file that is tailored to the set of fonts available on your
system. One possibility in making a custom fontdef file is to increase
or change the range of supported sizes.

Michael Downes
Technical Support Department
American Mathematical Society
Internet: tech-support@math.ams.org
800-321-4AMS extension 4080
401-455-4080