Using fonts from the LaTeX Font Catalogue.

Paulo Ney de Souza pauloney at gmail.com
Mon May 3 23:44:24 CEST 2021


I have to agree, with some in here, that on matters of font-installation
TeX gets a huge black-eye.

Yes, it is possible to read all the web-pages and material included and
install it, to know all that it takes to produce a page in plain-TeX, but
nonetheless it is still a mess and out of sync with the rest of TeX
installation and use. TeXLive did a huge improvement in everybody's life
mid-90's as far a TeX installation, but font-installation and use continues
on a pre-90's level.

Even with XeTeX and LuaTeX, that made a lot of this mute, it is, in some
cases, extremely hard to know even the "name" they need in order to load a
font via fontspec.

If you are looking for specialty fonts, like hieroglyphs,music, ... you are
in for a ride and a lot of reading before you can produce a single line of
text.

The situation is so messy that even for important fonts like MathTime Pro,
people go on to create their own installation scripts:

                https://github.com/jamespfennell/mathtime-installer

a script that does what it says (install the font) but in the process
damages your TeXLive installation.

"getnonfreefonts" changed that for the short list of its 11 current fonts.
It would be nice to see it extended to "getanyfont", I have given it a
thought a few times I had to go through one of these font installations.

Paulo Ney







On Mon, May 3, 2021 at 10:03 AM Philip Taylor <
P.Taylor at hellenic-institute.uk> wrote:

> Boris Veytsman wrote:
>
> PT> From: Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at Hellenic-Institute.Uk> <P.Taylor at Hellenic-Institute.Uk>
> PT> Date: Mon, 3 May 2021 10:31:36 +0100
>
>
> PT> An interesting question.  As one who never willing uses LaTeX, I started
> PT> by trying the obvious —
>
> [...]
>
> \font \myfont = "BrushScriptX-Italic"
>
>
> Am I too old-fashioned that for me the obvious is to read the
> documentation first?  The documentation recommends pbsi.sty, which
> solves the problem.
>
>
> The problem is, Boris, that unless one recognises (or knows) that all
> entries in the LaTeX font catalogue are hyperlinks, one has no way of
> knowing that such documentation exists.
> --
> *** Phil.*
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20210503/8df74133/attachment.html>


More information about the texhax mailing list.