Using fonts from the LaTeX Font Catalogue.

[David Carlisle]

Phil wrote

> Only after discussions with David Carlisle (to whom many thanks, as
always) did I learn that "\the ....

Phil you didn't  quote the most important part of my email!!


>  "why don't you use a sensible font selection scheme like latex's?"

Your idea that there could be a single package covering all fonts or that

>   A font is a little thing

show a complete misunderstanding about what these packages do.

Setting up a font is not a single \font command.  Typically you need to
know what optical sizes are available, which font do you use for 9.5pt
computer modern etc which font variants are available and what to
substitute or not, is there a bold small caps for this font etc etc...

You may be happy to use \font \foo = something at 10pt and not have any
other size variants available or italic or bold etc until you have found
the internal font names for all such variants but you are in  a tiny
minority.

Most people would rather specify a font family and then have
\large\itshape  select the matching large italic font without needing
dozens of lines of font setup in each document.

for luatex and xetex fontspec does in fact go a long way towards being a
single package for all fonts, as there, finding bold and size variants is
easier as there is information in the font, but even there for larger
families some font-specific setup is useful.

For (pdf)tex there really is no option, the font naming and font
availability is not regular enough: you really have little chance of
automatically finding what optical design sizes are available or
bold/italic variants without having them listed, most usefully as a package
that can simply be called by the end user.

David
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