Headings with Trajan font

Question

I intend to use the Trajan fonts for the headings of the chapters only (hence, not the section headings etc.) of my thesis. I am using a template provided by a previous student, and this is the section concerning the chapter headings:

%% Check for fancychap flag and change chapter default if true
\ifthenelse{\boolean{fancychapflag}}{%
  \titleformat{\chapter}[display]%
    {\huge\normalfont\defaultfont\filleft\onehalfspacing%
    \titlerule[1pt]%
    \vspace{1pt}%
    \titlerule}%
    {%
    \vspace{1ex}%
    \chaptertitlename \space \thechapter}%
    {0.5ex}%
    {\bfseries\Huge}%
    [\vspace{1ex}%
    \titlerule]%
    %% Control the spacing of the numbered chapters.
    \titlespacing*{\chapter}{0pt}{0pt}{30pt}
    \titleformat{name=\chapter,numberless}[display]%
    {\huge\normalfont\defaultfont\filcenter}%
    %% Move the title to the top of the page
    {\vspace{-6ex}}%
    {0pt}%
    {\titlerule\huge}%
    [\vspace{\parskip}%
    \titlerule]
    %% Control the spacing of the un-numbered chapters.
    \titlespacing*{name=\chapter,numberless}{0pt}{0pt}{30pt}%
    }%
  {%% Fix chapter spacing to one and a half
    \titleformat{\chapter}[display]%
    {\huge\normalfont\defaultfont\bfseries\onehalfspacing}%
    {\chaptertitlename\ \thechapter}%
    {20pt}%
    {\Huge}%
  }

where:

\newcommand{\defaultfont}{\ifthenelse{\boolean{sansflag}}{\sffamily}{}}

From a previous post, I now know that I need to use \trjnfamily instead of \deaultfont. However, I would like to modify the Trajan font (which comes only in capital letters) as follows:

• Use a slightly smaller font for non-capital letters and having Trajan recognize them as such (i.e. when you use Trajan with a small letter, it typically never shows anything).
• Use slightly larger letters for actual capitals.

This is as shown here, for instance: https://www.fonts.com/font/adobe/trajan/regular

My question is whether I can do this in the class file for the document, or whether I need to buy new fonts, such as Trajan Regular.

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

It sounds to me like what you really want is to make use of the Opentype font named Trajan Pro. If that's the case, you should look into using LuaLaTeX and the fontspec package. You could use the sectsty package and its \chapterfont macro to change the font used in chapter-level headers.

% !TeX program = lualatex
\documentclass{report} 
\usepackage{fontspec,booktabs}
\setmainfont{TexGyre Termes}  % just for this example
\newfontfamily{\trajan}[BoldFont=Trajan Pro Bold]{Trajan Pro}

\newcommand\hw{Hello World} % handy short-cut macro

\usepackage{sectsty}
\chapterfont{\centering\trajan} % "\centering" is optional!

\renewcommand\chaptername{Episode} % just for fun...
\renewcommand\thechapter{\Roman{chapter}}
\setcounter{chapter}{3}

\begin{document} 

\chapter{A New Hope}

\centering
\begin{tabular}{@{}lcc@{}}
\toprule 
 & non-bold & \bfseries bold \\
\midrule
Regular Times Roman     & \hw & \bfseries\hw \\
Small-caps Times Roman  & \scshape \hw & \scshape\bfseries \hw \\
Trajan Pro              & \trajan \hw & \trajan\bfseries \hw \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Answer 2

I think this is completely inappropriate, but the document is yours. Please, don't ask for accents and other diacritics: the free Trajan font on TeX Live has none of them.

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{xparse,l3regex}
\usepackage{titlesec}

\titleformat{\chapter}[display]%
  {\huge\fontsize{18}{24}\usefont{T1}{trjn}{m}{n}}
  {\maketrajan{\chaptertitlename}\ \Roman{chapter}}
  {20pt}
  {\maketrajan}

\ExplSyntaxOn
\NewDocumentCommand{\maketrajan}{m}
 {
  \anderlini_maketrajan:f { #1 }
 }
\cs_new_protected:Nn \anderlini_maketrajan:n
 {
  \tl_set:Nn \l_anderlini_title_tl { #1 }
  % change any run of lowercase letters into \trajanlower{<lc letters>}
  \regex_replace_all:nnN { ([a-z]+) } { \c{trajanlower}\cB\{\1\cE\} } \l_anderlini_title_tl
  \tl_use:N \l_anderlini_title_tl
 }
\cs_generate_variant:Nn \anderlini_maketrajan:n { f }
\NewDocumentCommand{\trajanlower}{m}
 {
  \group_begin:
  \fontsize{14}{0}\selectfont
  \tl_upper_case:n { #1 }
  \group_end:
 }
\tl_new:N \l_anderlini_title_tl
\ExplSyntaxOff

\begin{document}

\chapter{This is the title with Trajan letters}

\end{document}

Here's the complete character table of the font.

Answer 3

Hm, that's a tricky one since Trajan font isn't meant to have letters that aren't the same size (documentation here: http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/trajan/). I could work around the issue by modifying the package itself, but since you only need your exotic style for the title, I'm going to post my simple and sketchy solution anyway. I think its look is at least bearable.

So the first problem I've ran into is the environment of \trjnfamily. The following code produces the result:

\documentclass[13,legalpaper]{report}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{trajan}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document}

\title{
\begin{Huge}T\end{Huge}HIS \begin{Huge}I\end{Huge}S \begin{Huge}A\end{Huge} \begin{Huge}W\end{Huge}ONDERFUL \begin{Huge}T\end{Huge}HESIS
}

{\trjnfamily \maketitle}

\end{document}

The nasty thing about this code is that \maketitle dictates the font of the thesis title and furthermore, when the command itself is placed in the right environment, \trjnfamily interprets it as text (hence M,).

So I found a alternate solution that is pretty sketchy but still good-looking:

\documentclass[13,legalpaper]{report}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{trajan}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}
\vspace*{\stretch{1.0}}
\begin{center}
{\fontsize{18}{60}
{\trjnfamily \begin{Huge}T\end{Huge}HIS \begin{Huge}I\end{Huge}S \begin{Huge}A\end{Huge} \begin{Huge}W\end{Huge}ONDERFUL \begin{Huge}T\end{Huge}HESIS} \\
}
\vspace{0.5cm}
\large{Flying Spaghetti Monster} \\
\vspace{0.2cm}
\large{13.4 million years BC}
\end{center}
\vspace*{\stretch{2.0}}
\end{titlepage}

\end{document}

I hope this helps. The real problem would arise if you wanted to expand this style across the whole thesis. Then, my sketchy solution would be too time consuming. To my knowledge, no LaTeX command exists that is explicitly made for configuration of upper-case-only fonts.

Have a good day.

Answer 4

Also consider the free Cinzel font, which is similar to Trajan. Cinzel also has an Open Type version. I like Cinzel, for page headings.

If you are not locked into Trajan or equivalent for style reasons, you might also have a look at the free Raleway fonts, which come in many weights, and are also available as Open Type. Different look, but also nice for page headings.

EDIT: At Mico's request (and copying his code!) here is a MWE:

% !TeX program = lualatex
\documentclass{report} 
\usepackage{fontspec,booktabs}
\setmainfont{TexGyre Termes}  % just for this example
\newfontfamily{\cinzel}{Cinzel}
\newfontfamily{\raleway}{Raleway}

\newcommand\hw{Hello World} % handy short-cut macro

\usepackage{sectsty}
\chapterfont{\centering\cinzel} % "\centering" is optional!

\renewcommand\chaptername{Episode} % just for fun...
\renewcommand\thechapter{\Roman{chapter}}
\setcounter{chapter}{3}

\begin{document} 

\chapter{A New Hope}

\centering
\begin{tabular}{@{}lcc@{}}
\toprule 
 & non-bold & \bfseries bold \\
\midrule
Regular Times Roman     & \hw & \bfseries\hw \\
Small-caps Times Roman  & \scshape \hw & \scshape\bfseries \hw \\
Cinzel              & \cinzel \hw & \cinzel\bfseries \hw \\
Raleway              & \raleway\textsc \hw & \raleway\bfseries H\textsc{ello} W\textsc{orld} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Note that Raleway Bold is peculiar, in that the small caps are defined for uppercase, rather than lowercase letters. So I had to re-write Hello World to comply.