[pdftex] Concise Summary of using TTF fonts?

[Thierry Bouche]

"M. Wroth" a écrit :

> A fair question: I have been creating a number of technical documents using
> pdfTeX and the default cm fonts. I have received complaints from several
> people that some of the characteristics of the cm fonts (as displayed) make
> the documents difficult to read, especially on the screen (the specific
> characteristics causing the complaints are the very narrow vertical strokes).

change readership (or rotate them by 90°!) computer modern being a
"modern" font, it has a strong vertical axis, and hairline horizontal
strokes...


> So my desire is to substitute fonts with better on-screen readability for
> the cmr series, and the candidates I was looking at are TrueType (Georgia,
> specifically).  The resulting PDF file will often be read on screen, but
> sometimes printed.

Well, yes, CM really isn't a screen font, and Times or Palatino no more.
Lucida, although being the "canonical" lowres font, is quite ugly. I
personnally tend to prefer Utopia or Charter, which are both type 1 and
can be completed with math fonts (hand made from Lucida or MathTime for
Utopia, or using Euler for Charter). However, using TTF is quite simple
in pdftex, I never encountered any difficulty: it boils down to making
an AFM with a proper encoding using Thanh's ttf2afm, and then following
the same path as for type 1.


Th. B.