[Ipe-discuss] Fixing the exact font size.

[Otfried Cheong]

On Wed, Nov 6, 2019, at 14:00, Venkataraman Subramaniam via Ipe-discuss wrote:
> I want to use times font for labels in 
> the figures created using IPE. I have added
> \usepackage{times}
> \usepackage{mathptmx}
> in the preamble. I want the font size 
> to be exactly 10pt. How to achieve this?

With the "basic" stylesheet, "normal" textsize is 10pt.   You can also insist on an absolute fontsize by clicking on the "A" button next to the text size selector and entering the absolute size in points.

However, Ipe simply forwards this information to pdflatex to select and subset fonts, so it depends entirely on your TeX setup what exactly happens.

I've just tried it on my texlive distribution:   With \usepackage{times} in the preamble, the "normal" text size loads font

/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/urw/times/utmr8a.pfb 

which contains the font NimbusRomNo9L-Regu.    The font is then used like this:

/F34 9.9626 Tf 0 785.141 Td [(Abcdefg)]TJ

so the point size is actually set to 9.9626. 

This has nothing to do with Ipe.  If you run the following source through pdflatex:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{times}
\begin{document}
Abcdef
\end{document}

it will use the exact same 9.9626 setting for the font size.

I guess now you need to clarify what you mean by "10pt".   Are we speaking about Tex points?  10pt should be 
10 / 72.72 inch = 0.1375 inch.   9.9626 postscript points are 9.9626 / 72 = 0.1384 inch.    I don't know why the two numbers are not the same.

Or do you really want 10 postscript points as the font size?  There should be some way to achieve that in pdflatex, and the same method should then work in Ipe.

Cheers,
  Otfried