10 Fuentes de texto y símbolos

When we wrote the first edition of the LATEX Companion in 1994, the section on available text fonts for LaTEX was a few pages long and listed a handful of font families. Not because they were best in class, but because that was all that was available including those of a somewhat dubious quality. Basically when typesetting with TEX in those days, one could use any font as long as it was called Computer Modern.

A decade later the situation finally started to change, and it was in theory possible to use any font available in Type 1 format [1] — but only after somewhat extensive work preparing the necessary support files needed by TEX, in particular the font metric files (.tfm) and usually virtual font files (.vf) that reencoded the fonts to put the glyphs into the positions expected by the TEX engine. Providing these was not magic, especially after the appearance of the fontinst program1 by Alan Jeffrey, Rowland McDonnell, and Lars Hellström, but it took time and effort (even if necessary only once per font) and a good understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Thus, the number of available text fonts for use with TEX compared to other programs remained severely restricted. The second edition of the book again covered all that was freely available for LaTEX users, which amounted to fewer than two dozen font families. Of course, the CTAN archive already then contained some further support packages for a few commercial fonts. They were not included because the packages were useless unless you owned the particular family.

But with the third edition I faced a problem. With Unicode engines you can use essentially any freely or commercially available font by simply specifying it in the fontspec setup of your document. But also for the pdfTEX engine, font support exploded due to two factors: first the number of freely available fonts on the Web in either Type 1 [1], TrueType [8], or OpenType [127] format grew enormously, and second a few individuals like Marc Penninga, the author of autoinst, and Bob Tennent, Michael Sharpe, and a few others1 took the time to prepare configuration files for Marc’s autoinst program and with the necessary further adjustments and documentation produced packages that made a huge number of those freely usable fonts available to the LaTEX community at large.

My initial thought was to select only a few of the high-quality free fonts and largely ignore the rest — with just a mention that you find more possibilities in your TEX installation and on CTAN. But while working through all the font packages on CTAN to make a selection, I realized how difficult it is to hunt for them and that most likely any family not described in an overview remains unnoticed by the majority of users. Furthermore, while in the early days most free fonts were of a somewhat dubious quality, that too has now changed quite impressively for the better.

So in the end I decided to continue the tradition of offering a fairly comprehensive overview2 about today’s freely available fonts for LaTEX so that you can make an informed selection by just skimming this chapter and comparing the different possibilities and only then look further at the package documentation of the fonts you have chosen. You may also want to take a look at the online font catalogue maintained by Palle Jørgensen [77].