AMS Fonts and Formats

The American Mathematical Society has developed a set of fonts and macros for specialized mathematical typesetting, above and beyond the math fonts and capabilities designed by Donald Knuth for TeX and by Leslie Lamport for LaTeX. The AMS macros have special theorem environments and math environments and support for matrices. The AMS Fonts include many mathematical and other special characters not available elsewhere. Blue Sky has developed a PostScript version of these fonts for use with Textures, and of course the macros are compatible with the Textures system.

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The AMS Fonts

The PostScript Type 1 implementation of the AMS fonts produced by and previously distributed by Blue Sky and Y&Y, Inc. are now freely available for general use. This has been accomplished through the cooperation of a consortium of scientific publishers with Blue Sky and Y&Y. Members of this consortium include Elsevier Science, IBM Corporation, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Springer-Verlag, and the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

In order to assure the authenticity of these fonts, copyright will be held by the American Mathematical Society. This is not meant to restrict in any way the legitimate use of the fonts, such as (but not limited to) electronic distribution of documents containing these fonts, inclusion of these fonts into other public domain or commercial font collections or computer applications, use of the outline data to create derivative fonts and/or faces, etc. However, the AMS does require that the AMS copyright notice be removed from any derivative versions of the fonts which have been altered in any way. In addition, to ensure the fidelity of TeX documents using Computer Modern fonts, Professor Donald Knuth, creator of the Computer Modern faces, has requested that any alterations which yield different font metrics be given a different name.

The AMS does not provide technical support or installation assistance beyond any installation instructions included in this file. Installation and use of these fonts may require some technical expertise. Please review the READ.ME file in its entirety before undertaking an installation.

As of October 1, 1997, the AMS PostScript font set is free from the AMS. They are also included on the Textures CD.

If you have the AMS fonts and are having problem printing them, there may be a very easy solution. If your documents print out fine except there is a blank space wherever there is supposed to be an AMS symbol, try changing your screen depth to 256 colors. For some reason these fonts will not print if your screen is set to thousands or millions of colors (go figure). If you are having other printing problems, refer to the printing pages.

Two TeX formats explicitly call for these fonts: AMS-TeX and AMS-LaTeX, while the new form of LaTeX---LaTeX2e, which includes AMS-LaTeX as a package---also uses some of these fonts.

Missing Fonts

There are a few problems for Textures users right now which involve the differences between the PostScript sizes available and the list of available bitmap font sizes: fonts in sizes 6 and 8 point aren't in the PostScript font set but are in the bitmap font set. However, since the PostScript fonts are scalable, there should be no problem.

If you're using LaTeX2e and the AMS-LaTeX packages, the best solution is to add the package option psamsfonts to your usepackage statement, like this: \usepackage[psamsfonts]{amssymb}. The package "cmmib57", also available from the AMS, will also scale the fonts cmmib and cmbsy, and Ben made a modified version that should catch most of them called bencmmib57.sty.

Another solution is to use our virtual font set, which includes VFs for the even-numbered sizes. This is a fine way to fix the problem. These metrics are on our ftp server and are called "AMS.vf.metrics.hqx". The virtual font scaling has been fixed.

And Simon's AMS-VF metrics include the following font sizes.

CMBSY5, CMCSC8, CMEX7, CMMIB5,

EUEX7, EUFB5 ,EUFM5, EURB5, EURM5, EUSB5, EUSM5,

MSAM5, MSBM5, WNCYB5, WNCYI5, WNCYR5, WNCYSS8

AMS Formats

There are two main formats put out by the AMS to facilitate mathematical typesetting: AMS-TeX and AMS-LaTeX. Both of these formats can be used without the AMS fonts, but the special symbols in those fonts will not be availible. AMS-TeX is a format that is based on PlainTeX which establishes some macros for formatting journal articles and monographs the way the AMS (and the mathematics community in general) likes them. The AMS-TeX format comes with an option called AMS-TeXppt, which is the pre-print style and uses more fonts than the regular AMS-TeX format. AMS-LaTeX is a similar format based on LaTeX, which had many great "package" options for mathematical environments, commutative diagrams, as well as for formatting text.

AMS-TeX and AMS-TeXppt are both availible pre-formatted on our ftp server, and are part of our AMS-PostScript font set. The AMS's documentation for the formats is on the disks, or from the ams. The best reference source for AMS-TeX is The Joy of TeX, by Michael Spivak.

Also availible on our ftp server is a preformatted version of AMS-LaTeX that is based on LaTeX2.09. If you are not using LaTeX2e, but would like to typeset your documents in AMS-LaTeX, this is the format for you.

Using AMS-LaTeX within LaTeX2e is much more flexible in that you have the option of using whatever parts of AMS-LaTeX you need, whether it is the fonts, or specific parts of the formatting commands in the AMS-LaTeX format. There are three document classes: amsart (the AMS article class), amsbook (has a \chapter command) and amsproc (for formatting meeting proceedings). There are nine total packages within AMS-LaTeX, the most dominant of which is amsmath which defines environments for multiline equations, and other enhancements for math. The amsmath package will also invoke amstext, which allows for text within a display, amsbsy, which defines the \boldsymbol command, and amsopn, which allows you define new operator names.

In order to use the AMS symbols within AMS-LaTeX you need to invoke the package amssymb, which defines the fonts and commands for the symbols. If you are using the AMS-PostScript fonts you will need to use the documentclass option [psamsfonts]. If you are using the bitmap AMS fonts you should use the documentclass option [amsfonts]. Here is a sample of a preamble for a basic AMS-LaTeX document:

\documentclass[psamsfonts]{amsart}  
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{amscd}   %for making commutative diagrams

Please see the AMS-LaTeX documentation for more info on the other packages availible in AMS-LaTeX.

If you have set up your document as above and yet you get an error whenever you typeset that looks like this:

! LaTeX Error: *** NFSS release 1 command \define@mathgroup
*** Recovery not possible. Use \DeclareSymbolFont.
See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type H <return> for immediate help.

then you may have to move stuff around in your TeX inputs folder. The problem is that LaTeX2e is trying to load an amsfonts style file that is from an older version of LaTeX, or one that was modified for use with the Lucida fonts. The way to fix this is to look through all the TeX inputs folder for files called "amsfonts.sty" (case does not matter). Open those files up and see if they have the first few lines that look like:

%%
%% This is file `amsfonts.sty', generated 
%% with the docstrip utility (2.2i).
%%
%% The original source files were:
%% 
%% amsfonts.dtx 
%%% ====================================================================
%%%  @LaTeX-file{
%%%     filename        = "amsfonts.dtx",
%%%     version         = "2.2b",
%%%     date            = "1995/02/01",
%%%     time            = "11:12:55 EST",
%%%     author          = "American Mathematical Society",
%%%     copyright       = "Copyright (C) 1995 American Mathematical Society,
%%%                        all rights reserved.

This is the correct file for use with AMS-LaTeX in LaTeX2e. This file should be in your *LaTeX folder. If you find other amsfonts.sty files you should make sure that they are in their appropriate *formatname folders. If any of these files are on the root level of the TeX Inputs then Textures will look at that first, and ignore the proper one in the *LaTeX folder, and that will generate the bad LaTeX error.

Write to us :help@bluesky.com.