[Tex/LaTex] Alchemical symbols with LaTeX

fontssymbols

I need to draw symbols of alchemical processes in a LaTeX document: in particular, I'm interested in the process of "amalgamation", depicted here at page 15:

enter image description here

I'm open to any suggestion, even something like "draw it on your own!", just teach me how.

Keep in mind that the general look of the symbol(s) should match well with the "classical" lmodern font in a "classical" LaTeX page (containing also some mathematics).

Best Answer

There is (at least) one free true type font, named Alchemy that has this symbol. It's available from here for instance. Demo, with Xe/LuaLaTeX:

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\begin{document}

The \emph{amalgamation} or \emph{conjunction} symbol:
\fontspec{Alchemy}\enspace
\LARGE p

\end{document}

enter image description here

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Create a symbol font from SVG symbols

Here are some rough step-by-step instructions to generate a font using FontForge and make it available to TeX.

Start FontForge and create a new font.
Import the SVG files into the different glyphs. The import is not perfect: For example, you might need to remove some spurious paths, and you should move and scale the glyphs so that they sit on the baseline and their height does not exceed 1000 units (probably around 800 units is fine). See also the instructions on the FontForge site.
Use File->Generate Fonts to generate a (binary) PostScript Type1 font. Only 256 characters are accessible in one PS Type 1 font, so if you have 700 symbols, you actually want to make 3 different fonts (or you can make one font and then let pdftex/dvips re-encode them, but this a bit more complicated.) Alternatively, generate an OpenType font, which you can use directly with LuaTeX or XeTeX.
You can let FontForge create TeX font metrics too, or you can use afm2tfm to generate these from the .afm files that FontForge generates.
Generate a map file mysymbols.map that lists your fonts in the following format
```
mysymbols1 MySymbols1 <mysymbols1.pfb
mysymbols2 MySymbols2 <mysymbols2.pfb
mysymbols3 MySymbols3 <mysymbols3.pfb
```
The syntax of map files is described in Chapter 6 of the dvips manual.
Copy all (.tfm, .pfb and .map) files into a texmf tree: .tfm files go into a subfolder of fonts/tfm/, .pfb files into a subfolder of fonts/type1 and the .map file goes into a subfolder of fonts/map/dvips.
You might need to regenerate the file database by running mktexlsr.
Activate the map file. In TeXLive, you can do this by running
```
updmap-sys --enable Map mysymbols.map
```
as a super user (Use updmap if you don't have admin rights.)
Now you should be able to use the fonts in TeX. For instance
```
\font\mysym=mysymbols1 at 10pt\mysym\char0
```
should print the first glyph in mysymbols1.
To use the font with the LaTeX font selection macros, you need to declare it using \DeclareFontFamily and \DeclareFontShape in a package or font definition file. For instance, to declare the first family, you could use the following code:
```
\DeclareFontFamily{U}{mysymbols1}{}
\DeclareFontShape{U}{mysymbols1}{m}{n}{ <-> mysymbols1 }{}
```
After that, you can access the font in LaTeX like this:
```
\usefont{U}{mysymbols1}{m}{n}\char0
```
See the LaTeX 2e font selection guide for more information.

[Tex/LaTex] Table mapping mathematical and scientific symbols to their meanings

the concept of tables (not just one, surely!) mapping math and scientific symbols to their meanings in particular fields is undoubtedly worthy, and in fact, the question has been asked before, but, as far as i am aware, nothing organized has ever been done about it.

in fact, accomplishing such a feat may be next to impossible. or, as some competent mathematicians have informed me, it may be a useless exercise. why? first, because so many symbols are used, often with different meanings, in different areas. also, a mathematician can define his/her own notation, and if there's not already a well established symbol for a concept (which would be known to a mathematician experienced in the area), a new one will often be selected based on its shape relative to that of symbols already used for related concepts, regardless of the new symbol's meaning in other areas.

so, such tables would be of use mostly to newcomers in the field, mainly graduate students, and few established mathematicians have the incentive or interest in doing what for them would probably be a rather menial job. and the students are usually too busy working on their research, which will lead to the formal recognition of a degree, while working on very useful tex-related projects gains nothing more than appreciation. (more than one degree has foundered on such a shoal.)

it may be instructive to consider how some existing symbol collections were compiled. the basic cmsy and cmex fonts provide the symbols that knuth needed for the art of computer programming. that's a basic computer science collection. the additional amssymb collection (msa and msb fonts) were based on what had been used or required for ams publications prepared by earlier means, including the symbols collection provided by the science typographers software augmented with items from the monotype symbols lists -- none of them identified by anything but an access code meaningless except within the context of that composition system. the control sequence names assigned to the "ams symbols" were usually just the names used by proofreaders, who were often not even mathematicians, and certainly not area specialists.

the stix collection, which was the basis for the massive increase of technical symbols in unicode 3 and 4, started with the cm and ms fonts (no name changes), the symbols component of sgml entity sets (iso tr 9573-13), "needed" lists compiled by the stipub organizations (ams, acs, aip, aps, ieee, siam, and elsevier), and some additional contributions from wolfram and design sciences. but again, no area identification was included.

compiling area-specific lists requires specialist knowledge, i.e., people. let's leave that aside for the moment.

what approach(es) might be considered for compiling lists by frequency? only one comes immediately to mind: from a corpus of (la)tex publications, count the occurrences of all control sequences, ignoring those that are clearly not symbols (\chapter, \section, \begin, \end, etc.).

but there are problems. authors often define their own macros for either individual symbols or preformed strings of symbols, so the uses of the symbols themselves in the body can't easily be counted. even worse, many authors, over time, compile great collections of macros that they've used before and might use again, and simply dump those into either the preamble or a separate .sty file without any "weeding", so it's not easy to tell whether a particular macro (and thus symbol) is actually used in a job.

it is possible to filter for a few specific symbols by macro name; i've done it to document usage as required for acceptance into unicode, but it's non-trivial. what's necessary is an automated procedure.

here are steps that might be applied to article files:

expand all macros in the body, so that the definitions aren't needed any more;
remove all definitions from job;
tex to make sure nothing is lost;
confirm that the output is the same as the original.

undertaking such a task would need a good programmer and a really dedicated tester and/or support from some organization (probably not publishers, other than for access to files, since they're already hard pressed).

now, how to identify the areas in which these symbols are used? even if the area of an article is well defined (say by a subject classification as defined for mathscinet), it's not clear that it's a good example of symbol usage, so any automatic compilation of symbols would still require manual checking.

i think the only reasonable prospect for creating area-specific lists would be action by knowledgeable humans. any volunteers?

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Create a symbol font from SVG symbols

[Tex/LaTex] Table mapping mathematical and scientific symbols to their meanings

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