Hi,

I was concerned about the available solutions to produce large fonts
within LaTeX2e, e.g. for the generation of posters. There are solutions
out there (like a0poster), but I'm unsatisfied by the \DeclareFontShape
for all those fonts in need.

I'm aware of the problem, that fonts like cmr, cmss, ecrm and so on are
originally designed only for smaller font sizes and the authors didn't
want to just scale the fonts up (otherwise it could have been allowed in
the font description files already). On the other hand, scaling up the
fonts to large sizes does at least work. And it is used quite a lot in
some communities.

In the enclosed package "sizesub.sty" I suggest a different solution
than doing a \DeclareFontShape for a hole bunch of fonts. Instead, I
change the behaviour of the NFSS. Originally, when a font is not
available in the requested size, the font closest in size is used. I
modify this behaviour and allow for the rescaling of that choosen size
to the requested size.

By that, the usual restriction to some specific font sizes is lost. This
has the disadvantage, that fonts are scaled to all sizes whenever the
user requests it. (La)TeX needs only the tfm files of the unscaled fonts
whose sizes are still under control of the font description file. But
for actually creating something printable, for metafont fonts pk's have
to be created, which takes time and uses disk space. Type1 fonts instead
can just be scaled.

After having the possibility to use the fonts in every size wanted (by
\fontsize{}{}\selectfont --- see example1), size selection routines are
needed. A solution is provided by "sizedef.sty". This package builds a
hole collection of commands from \SMALLSIZE to \LARGESIZE out of the
size of \normalsize given as a parameter to the package (see example2).

I would appreciate any comments about the solution I suggested.


André Wobst