Installing personal TeX fonts

This web page is about installing a TeX-ready font in a personal directory. The somewhat simpler process of installing new fonts in a system directory is described separately. This page will assume you have read the other one, and thus are generally aware of TeX font installation procedures.

This page is only about TeX Live 2012 and later. Earlier versions of TeX Live used an analogous but somewhat different procedure. (If you can report the specifics of how to do this under MiKTeX, we'd be happy to include that.)

The procedure

Here is a general outline for installing fonts in a personal directory:

1. Put the TDS-ready font packages under $TEXMFHOME. Running kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFHOME should return its default value. (Aside: $TEXMFHOME can refer to multiple trees, if you want it to: use a brace-delimited comma-separated list of directories, e.g., {$HOME/dir1,$HOME/dir2} .)

2. Create the file $TEXMFHOME/web2c/updmap.cfg, with the needed (Mixed)Map entries for these personal-tree fonts.

3. Run updmap. (Not updmap-sys.) The result should be updated pdftex.map, psfonts.map, etc., files in your personal directories, containing all entries for all font—both personal and system.

The principal downside of this is that if a new font is installed in the system directories (e.g., via tlmgr update), those map entries will not be installed. You yourself have to rerun updmap.

Good luck. If you have technical questions or problems with installing fonts, please try writing texhax@tug.org. For corrections to this web page, contact the TUG webmaster (link below).