10.1 Overview

All fonts described in this chapter are freely available and with a few exceptions are included in the major TEX distributions such as TEX Live or MiKTEX so that you can

start using them directly. We made two exceptions and also included the commercially available Cambria fonts as well as the Lucida font families that we use in this book. The Cambria fonts, while under a proprietary license, ship as part of Windows and Office products and are therefore widely available without the need for buying an additional license. They offer excellent math support and for that alone are worth a closer look. The Lucida families are sold by the TEX Users Group (TUG) at a special price for members of TUG and several other user groups.1

In the open source world, “free” is a widely debated word, and some fonts are just not “free enough” to be included in free software distributions, because their license is somewhat restrictive, typically either forbidding modifications of the fonts (which is most likely not any issue for the readers of this book) or disallowing commercial usage. The latter refers to actions such as selling them or distributing them as part of a commercial system— none of the licenses of the fonts we cover prohibit the free use of the fonts even if the result, say, a book like this, is then sold. Thus, this should not pose a problem either, but of course, you should be aware that fonts you need to install “manually” have a special license, and you better check what it says if you intend to do anything with it other than simply typesetting your texts.

Omitting high-quality fonts because of license restrictions (even if very minor) is a sensible approach, as it means that the users of the distribution can rely on the fact that everything contained is covered by one of the major free licenses and that there are no restrictions on use and only well-known ones on modification; e.g., most LaTEX software uses the LaTEX Project Public License (LPPL), GNU Public License (GPL), or any other of the few major open source licenses.

But of course, it puts an additional burden on the user, as they have to manually install the fonts (besides checking the license requirements). Fortunately, there is an easy way to integrate such font packages into your installation. At the TEX Users Group website a script by Reinhard Kotucha is provided. It is a simple matter of downloading the install-getnonfreefonts installer from https: //www.tug.org/fonts/getnonfreefonts/ and processing it on the command line (in a Windows, macOS, or Linux terminal window) using

10.1.1 Notes on the font samples

All font families in this chapter are exhibited using the same example text to allow for easy comparison and at the same time to show many details and possible limitations of the fonts. The standard setup uses the following text:

10.1.2 Notes on the font family tables

In addition to the sample text, we show for each font family a table that contains the necessary information to select a font from that family in a document using the NFSS conventions. These tables are always identically structured; a sample table is shown as Table 10.1.

We show the ⟨official font family name⟩ followed by the ⟨font name or names⟩ that you need to use when accessing the family in a Unicode engine using fontspec. In the remainder of the line we then list the supported encodings, e.g., OT1, T1, etc. The next lines show the NFSS classification, i.e., the NFSS ⟨family⟩ and supported ⟨series⟩ and ⟨shape⟩ values, followed by a short text sample exhibiting some of the series/shape combinations (but usually not all).

If the font family consists of several distinctive designs, e.g., a serif, a sans serif, or a monospaced design, then this structure is repeated for the related font families as often as necessary.

10.1.3 Font support packages

As mentioned earlier, the bulk of the font support packages has been provided by a few individuals, and because of this, the majority of the packages are very similar in nature and provide identically named options for the same tasks in most circumstances. Thus, instead of adding a list of every option or command to the description of each of the more than 120 font packages, we give an overview here so that you know what to expect. For further details you then have to consult the package documentation, but in most cases this overview will hopefully suffice.

Please also note that many of the packages, in particular those by Bob Tennent, provide compatibility between the different processing engines; i.e., they successfully hide the differences between NFSS as used by pdfTEX and fontspec needed in the Unicode engines X TE EX or LuaTEX.

10.1.4 Direct use of the fonts (without a package)

Using a font support package is often convenient, but it is seldom really necessary, and in some cases it is actually counterproductive. For example, most font packages install the family as a default of some sort, e.g., as the document sans serif family (). But if you want to use that font for only a special effect, then you have to undo that kind of setup or make sure to load all support packages in the right order so that part of their configuration gets undone by the next package (if possible).

Fortunately, the font classification tables are enough to directly use any font exhibited in this chapter. All you have to do is to place the relevant data from the tables into the appropriate NFSS commands, e.g., , , , or , or use them for changing the document defaults, e.g., , , and so on.

In the next example we set up Fira Sans with lining figures (-LF) as the sans serif document font and then use Alegreya with oldstyle figures (-OsF) in ultra-bold at 42 points (without any leading) for a splashing headline (using ). We then change the size to and the font to . That means the text would still be in ultra-bold (which is available in Fira-Sans; see Table 10.5 on page 14), but we want a strong contrast, so we go for extra-light via . We can omit the as that is implicitly done by .