Finding new fonts
Nowadays, new fonts are seldom developed by industrious people using
Metafont, but if such do appear, they will nowadays be distributed in
the same way as any other part of (La)TeX collections. (An
historical review of Metafont fonts available is held on CTAN
as “Metafont font list”.) Nowadays, most new fonts that appear are
only available in some scalable outline form, and a large proportion
is distributed under commercial terms.
Such fonts often make their way to the free distributions (at least
TeX Live and MiKTeX) if their licensing is such that the
distributions can accept them. Commercial fonts do not get to
distributions, though support for some of them is held by CTAN.
Arranging for a new font to be usable by (La)TeX is very different,
depending on which type of font it is, and which TeX-alike engine
you are using; roughly speaking:
- MetaFont fonts will work without much fuss (provided their
sources are in the correct place in the installation’s tree);
TeX-with-dvips, and PDFTeX are “happy” with them.
- Adobe Type 1 fonts can be made to work, after
.tfm
and (usually) .vf
files have been created from their
metric (.afm
) files.
- TrueType fonts can be made to work with PDFTeX, using the
techniques discussed in ANSWER TO BE WRITTEN
- TrueType and OpenType fonts are the usual sort used by XeTeX
and LuaTeX; they “just work” with those engines.
The answer “choice of scalable fonts” discusses
fonts that are configured for general (both textual and mathematical)
use with (La)TeX. The list of such fonts is sufficiently short that
they can all be discussed in one answer.
- Metafont font list
- info/metafont-list
This answer last edited: 2012-03-27
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=findfont