Contents of Preloading Fonts

Preloading Fonts

Now you have to decide which fonts to preload in your format. Unlike the old font selection scheme of L^ATEX, where only preloaded fonts could be used in math applications (like subscripts etc.), the new font selection scheme poses no restriction at all; documents will always come out the same. So you have to take your pick by weighing the two conflicting principles:

Preloading often used fonts might make your TEX run a bit faster.
Using more load-on-demand fonts will make your format much more flexible, because you can switch to different families far more easily. After all, there is an upper limit to the number of fonts TEX can use in one run and every preloaded font will count even if it is never accessed.

On the PC at home we nowadays always use formats with only 5 fonts preloaded.¹¹ We don't think that TEX is actually running much more slowly than before.

Together with the new font selection scheme two files preload.min and preload.ori are distributed. The first one will preload next to nothing while the second will preload the same fonts as the old lfonts.tex. You can copy either of these files to preload.tex and then change it if you want to preload some other fonts. But please make sure that you don't change one of the original files of the distribution.