Using fonts from the LaTeX Font Catalogue.

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Tue, 4 May 2021 11:07:52 +0100 schrieb Philip Taylor:

>> The general advice to use any font in latex is to try to find a 
>> support package and to use it.
> 
> And people wonder why some prefer Microsoft Word to TeX.
> 
> Really, I am having great trouble not using profanities here — someone 
> wants to use a different font to the default, and they have to search 
> for a /support package/ in order to use it ?!  What sort of insanity is 
> this ? 

What is your problem? We can't in tex use some pop-up dialog to
setup fonts, we have to add code. We can't preload the code for all
existing fonts into the latex format, so some code has to be added
at run time. Normally people don't want to copy&paste identical code
around and fill up their preamble with it, so such code is in some
external files so that it can be loaded from various documents.

We use \usepackage to load code from external files, you use perhaps
\input{my-font-setup-for-X}. 


> If, as I suspect, the problem lies primarily with those fonts 
> that exist only as AFM/PFA (or B) pairs, then why don't we just mark all 
> such fonts as "deprecated" and recommend only those fonts that exist as 
> TTF/OTF ?  These can then be handled natively by Xe[La]TeX, and will 
> need no "support package" at all.

open type fonts make life a bit easier as you don't have to prepare
tfm and vf-files, but they need code too and for some of the larger
families there are a number of support packages, e.g. fira or
libertine. How many lines does it take you to setup the fonts for a
document? With all the (perhaps optical) fontsize, bold, italic,
small caps etc? Do you do this setup always in the main tex file or
do you have some prepared files you input? 

-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/