http://tldp.org/HOWTO/TeTeX-HOWTO-7.html

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One of the major improvements of LaTeX2e over its predecessor was the inclusion of the New Font Selection Scheme — called PSNFSS.

Formerly TeX font selection method provides precision but requires the skills of a type designer and mathematician to make good use of. Also, it's not very portable. If another system didn't have the specified font, somebody would have to re-code the fonts specifications for the entire document.

PSNFSS, however, allows you specify fonts by family (Computer Modern, URW Nimbus, Helvetica, Utopia, and so forth), weight (light, medium, bold), orientation (upright or oblique), face (Roman, Italic), and base point size. (See the section Characters and type styles for a description of the commands to specify typefaces.) Many fonts are packaged as families. For example, a Roman-type font may come packaged with a sans serif font, like Helvetica, and a monospaced font, like Courier. You, as the author of a LaTeX document, can specify an entire font family with one command.

There are, as I said, several high-quality font sets available in the public domain. One of them is Adobe Utopia. Another is Bitstream Charter. Both are commercial quality fonts which have been donated to the public domain. These happen to be two of my favorites.

The important thing to look for is files which have either the .pfa or .pfb extension. They indicate that these are the scalable fonts themselves, not simply the metrics files. Type 1 fonts use .pfm metric files, as opposed to the .tfm metric files which bit mapped fonts use. The two font sets I mentioned above are included in teTeX distributions, as well as separately.

If we want to use the Charter fonts in our document instead of Computer Modern bit mapped, all that is necessary is include the LaTeX statement

\renewcommand{\familydefault}{bch}

in the document preamble, where “bch” is the common designation for Bitstream Charter. The Charter fonts reside in the directory

/usr/lib/teTeX/texmf/fonts/type1/bitstrea/charter

There you'll see the .pfb files of the Charter fonts: bchb8a.pfb for Charter Bold, bchr8a.pfb for Charter Roman, bchbi8a.pfb for Charter Bold Italic. The “8a” in the font names indicates the character encoding.

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documented on: 2008-06-21