[lucida] fonts in plain TeX

[Karl Berry]

    Would it be difficult to implement the Lucida fonts for plain TeX?

There's nothing to implement.  Unlike LaTeX, plain TeX has no
infrastructure for fonts requiring additional files, encoding
definitions, etc.  Everything is up to you.

    Actually, what fonts are now available, ready for plain TeX in the TeX
    Live distribution? 

All of them.  Any font that is usable by LaTeX (or ConTeXt or whatever)
can be used from plain TeX.

    Is there some one piece documentation about the
    subject, including text and math fonts?

Ah.  Well, for a list of available fonts, see http://tug.org/fonts and
the links there.  There is a nice math font survey.

As for using them from plain TeX, font usage is in the TeXbook, of
course, and all the plain TeX tutorials and guides.  Here are a couple links:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/gentle/
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/impatient/  (on, e.g., page 54-55)

The basic idea is that you say
  \font\foobar = fname
where "fname" is the filename of the TFM file, that is, a file named
fname.tfm must be available on your system.  Then
  {\foobar hello world}
typesets the given text in that font.

I'll append a table with some of the Lucida names.

Hope this helps,
Karl

--

The following table shows the descriptive PostScript font name, the
original Y&Y l* name used for afm, pfb, and pfm files, and an h* tfm
name, for the Y&Y texnansi 8y encoding, in the case of the text fonts.
(The text fonts actually have several corresponding tfm's, one for each
TeX encoding used; notably, 8y can be replaced with 8t to get the LaTeX
T1 ("Cork") encoding.)
                                           
/FontName:                       .afm,pfb,pfm name:     sample tfm name:

LucidaBright                     lbr                    hlhr8y
LucidaBrightSmallcaps            lbrsc                  hlhrc8y
LucidaBright-Oblique             lbsl                   hlhro8y
LucidaBright-Italic              lbi                    hlhri8y
LucidaBright-Demi                lbd                    hlhb8y
LucidaBrightSmallcaps-Demi       lbdsc                  hlhbc8y
LucidaBright-DemiItalic          lbdi                   hlhbi8y
LucidaSans                       lsr                    hlsr8y
LucidaSans-Italic                lsi                    hlsri8y
LucidaSans-Demi                  lsd                    hlsb8y
LucidaSans-DemiItalic            lsdi                   hlsbi8y
LucidaSans-Bold                  lsb                    hlsu8y
LucidaSans-BoldItalic            lsbi                   hlsui8y
LucidaTypewriter                 lbtr                   hlcrt8y
LucidaTypewriterOblique          lbto                   hlcrot8y
LucidaTypewriterBold             lbtb                   hlcbt8y
LucidaTypewriterBoldOblique      lbtbo                  hlcbot8y
LucidaSans-Typewriter            lstr                   hlsrt8y
LucidaSans-TypewriterOblique     lsto                   hlsrot8y
LucidaSans-TypewriterBold        lstb                   hlsbt8y
LucidaSans-TypewriterBoldOblique lstbo                  hlsbot8y
LucidaCalligraphy-Italic         lbc                    hlcrie8y
LucidaHandwriting-Italic         lbh                    hlcriw8y
LucidaCasual                     lbkr                   hlcrn8y
LucidaCasual-Italic              lbki                   hlcrin8y
LucidaBlackletter                lbl                    hlcrf8y
LucidaFax                        lfr                    hlxr8y
LucidaFax-Italic                 lfi                    hlxri8y
LucidaFax-Demi                   lfd                    hlxb8y
LucidaFax-DemiItalic             lfdi                   hlxbi8y
LucidaNewMath-Arrows             lbma                   hlcra
LucidaNewMath-Arrows-Demi        lbmad                  hlcda
LucidaNewMath-Demibold           lbmd                   hlcdm
LucidaNewMath-DemiItalic         lbmdi                  hlcdim
LucidaNewMath-AltDemiItalic      lbmdo                  hlcdima
LucidaNewMath-Extension          lbme                   hlcrv
LucidaNewMath-Italic             lbmi                   hlcrim
LucidaNewMath-AltItalic          lbmo                   hlcrima
LucidaNewMath-Roman              lbmr                   hlcrm
LucidaNewMath-Symbol             lbms                   hlcry
LucidaNewMath-Symbol-Demi        lbmsd                  hlcdy