Using fonts from the LaTeX Font Catalogue.

Philip Taylor P.Taylor at Hellenic-Institute.Uk
Tue May 4 15:06:01 CEST 2021


Ulrike Fischer wrote:

>
> It will *allow* him to use 1000 fonts. But what exactly should he
> then do to actually *use* the one specific font family he wants to
> use? Read through the 300 page documentation of your AFMPFX to find
> the right command combination?

No, of course not, because all he will need to know is the name of the 
font that he wants to use.  The documentation (which may run to ten pp 
at most) would be entirely expressed in terms of "the font that you want 
to use", which of course he will express in plain text as (e.g.,) 
"BrushScriptX-Italic" and not via some ridiculous 8+3 naming convention 
that Noah already considered primitive when he was designing the 
lettering for his ark ...

> Why should Rolf have to care about the font format? He wants to load
> a font family by name and not have to do some research on font
> technology first. Why should he have to fight with types like tfm,
> vf, pfb, pfa, mf, otf, ttf, ttc?  Has word an "otf fonts" and "ttf
> fonts" and "ttc fonts" menu?

Ideally he would not have to, but unless I am very much mistaken, 
internally there are different routes through which conventional 
(TFM+PK), type-1 (AFM+PFA/B), TTF/OTF fonts and so on are handled, so to 
make the task manageable I envisaged these being split out into separate 
packages.  But of course there is no reason at all why these could not 
then be unified these into one single package called (e.g.,) 
"fonts.sty".  But to address a point from your earlier message :

> What would be the gain? I would have to load
>
> \usepackage{afmpfx}
>
> which would contain thousands of code lines to setup code for
> hundreds of fonts I don't want to use and I would have to use
> additionally some command to select roboto. \usepackage{roboto} is
> less typing, does the same and would load only a small number of
> code lines.

*/Why/* would it [necessarily] "contain thousands of code lines to setup 
code for hundreds of fonts" ?  Why would it not set up pro-forma code 
for each distinct font format and then use \csname ...\endcsname to 
invoke that factored-out generic code for the particular font(s) that 
Rolf wants to use ?
-- 
/** Phil./
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