Should I use \documentclass[12pt]{article} with \Large or \documentclass{article} with \LARGE?

Question

So, I'm working on making some cards, and they need to have nice, large, clear text. So I've set the text to be \LARGE. Then I was thinking, am I doing bad things to the font by over-enlarging it? It seems the size options in article only go up to 12pt, but should I be using 12pt and \Large instead? That seems to be roughly equivalent.

Are either of these the right way to get very large text for printing cards and such, if that is the majority of the text in my document, or should I be defining the text as large somewhere else?

Answer 1

10pt \LARGE is \newcommand\LARGE{\@setfontsize\LARGE\@xviipt{22}}

12pt \Large is \newcommand\Large{\@setfontsize\Large\@xviipt{22}}

which is the same thing.

But for a custom font for a custom use like your card example, there is not a lot of point in restricting yourself to the sizes based on magstep scaling of the original cm fonts.

Add \usepackage{fix-cm} (if you are using cm) so your fonts are scalable and then just use

\fontsize{18}{25}\selectfont

or whatever fits best.