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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX

Chapter 6: Layouts and fonts

Section 6.3: The LATEX font catalogue

The LATEX Font Catalog is a web site created and maintained by Palle Jørgensen at http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/. It lists over 200 typefaces for use with LATEX, many of them available nowhere else, with samples and links to the directories on CTAN where you can download them. You can spend many fascinating hours downloading and installing them and trying them out in your documents.

If no TDS zip file is provided (check on the typeface’s web page on CTAN at https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts), you will need to use the plain zip file and move the subdirectories into The Right Places yourself.

    Installing a font from the Font Catalogue manually

  1. Download the zip file from the link download the contents of this package in one zip archive on the typeface’s CTAN web page, which is either at the bottom or the right-hand side, depending on the width of your screen.

  2. Open the zip file in your directory browser (see row 2 in Table 1 above). Inside the zip file there will be several subdirectories, shown in Figure 6.1 below

    Figure 6.1: Layout of a font zip file downloaded from CTAN

    fontziplayout

    You will want three folders: doc, latex, and either the truetype or the opentype, whichever one is there.

  3. Open the doc zip directory and check the README or AUTHORS file to identify the company or individual responsible for the typeface. This is commonly called the ‘foundry’, following the habits of the old hot-metal type era. It should be one word, or an acronym.

  4. In your Personal TEX Directory, create places to put these, replacing foundry and typeface names with meaningful one-word values:

    Zip file directoryTDS directory
    docfonts/doc/foundry/typeface
    latextex/latex/typeface
    opentype¹fonts/opentype/foundry/typeface
    truetype¹fonts/truetype/foundry/typeface

    ¹ Font zip files normally provide either a truetype folder or an opentype folder. If both, pick one.

  5. Extract the contents of each of the three zip folders in turn into the folders you have created in your Personal TEX Directory according to the table in step 4 above.

    The foundry name is not essential, but it helps to use a separate folder because it identifies where the fonts originated, which can help with choosing fonts.

If there was a package (.sty) file in the latex zip directory, you can use it in your documents, otherwise load the font[s] you want as shown in § 6.2.2.2 above.