LaTeX Lessons

Lesson Four: Using Colour Fonts

Colour is mainly for presentations, keep in mind most of our printers are grey scale printers, and colour printing is expensive. But using greyscale within a paper or thesis can add aesthetics at no extra printing cost, but note photocopying may not come out the way you were expecting, so do test before running off 200 copies. As for sending as FAXs don't bother, some are set as black and white only.

Below gives a brief example on inserting standard colours.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{pstcol}
\begin{document}
\noindent {\blue This is blue}\\
{\darkgray This is darkgray}\\
\end{document}

Download: latsam4a.tex

This is blue
This is darkgray

The following shows you a more extensive example on defining and inserting colours.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{pstcol}
\newgray{darkergray}{0.3}
\newcmykcolor{tancmyk}{0 0.42 1 0}
\newrgbcolor{tanrgb}{0.98 0.67 0.33}
\usepackage{pstcol}
\begin{document}
\noindent \textcolor{darkergray}{This is darkergray}\\
\textcolor{tancmyk}{This is tan cymk}\\
\textcolor{tanrgb}{This is tan rgb}\\
\end{document}

Download: latsam4b.tex

This is darkergray
This is tan cymk
This is tan rgb

Try experimenting with defining colours of your own, see the Staff/Graduate guide to LaTeX for references to calculating rgb numbers.

This concludes lesson 4.

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