One of the major improvements of LaTeX2e over its predecessor was the inclusion of the New Font Selection Scheme. (It's now called PSNFSS.) Formerly, TeX authors would specify fonts with commands like
\font=bodyroman = cmr10 scaled \magstep 1
<\code>
which provides precision but requires the skills of a type designer to
make good use of. Also, it's not very portable. If another system
didn't have the font cmr10 (this is TeX nomenclature for Computer
Modern Roman, 10 point, with the default medium stroke weight),
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), and face
(Roman, Italic), and base point size. Also, 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. If you look around one of the
CTAN sites, however, you will find these and other fonts archived
there. There are enough fonts around that you'll be able to design
documents the way you want them to look, and not just English text,
either. TeX was originally designed for mathematical typesetting, so
there is a full range of mathematical fonts available, as well as
Cyrillic, Greek, Kana, and other alphabets too numerous to mention.
The important thing to look for is files which have either the .pfa or
.pfb extension. They indicate that these are the 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 the teTeX Slackware
distribution.
As a bit of an aside, fonts are a contentious subject. They are both
data and a form of expression, and that makes them vulnerable to
less-than-fair-usage. In other words, it's easy for someone to copy a
font design without somehow compensating the original designer of the
font. Sometimes discovering who the original designer was is
difficult also. I mention this here because recently Blue Sky
Research donated Type 1 versions of the Computer Modern fonts to the
public domain. However, only crippled versions of these fonts are
available now because some biz-whizzes decided they could re-issue the
Type 1 CM fonts as shareware, conveniently omitting ligatures,
punctuation, and other essential characters. These fonts should be
avoided. Certainly do not send these Value-Added Resellers any money,
because they are simply exploiting Blue Sky Research's generosity. I
don't know all the details, but you can take a look at the fonts for
yourself without paying anything for them. Then delete them, because
they're not worth the disk space they're stored on.
In the meantime, the Bitstream Charter fonts which come with teTeX are
the best alternative for a public domain, Type 1 font.
What I said above, concerning the ease of font selection under PSNFSS,
is true in this instance. 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
<code>
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{bch}
/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. At this point you don't need to worry about them, because
the encodings mostly differ for 8-bit characters, which have numeric
values above 128 decimal. They mostly define accents, and foreign
characters. You'll be concerned with them if you're typesetting
documents in say, Spanish, but for now the default encodings are fine.
The Type 1 fonts conform to the ISO standards for international
character sets, so this is an added benefit of using them.
To typeset a document which has Charter fonts selected, you would give the command
pslatex document.tex
At this point it is finally appropriate to say that installing a Type 1 font set is not difficult, as long as you follow a few basic steps. You should unpack the fonts in a subdirectory of the fonts/type1 directory, where your other Type 1 fonts are located, and then run texhash to let the directory search routines know that the fonts have been added. Then you need to add the font descriptions to the file psfonts.map so dvips knows they're on the system. The format of the psfonts.map file is covered in a couple different places in the references mentioned above. Again, remember to run the texhash program to update the teTeX directory database. (Actually it's a ls-lR file.)
It is definitely an advantage to use the X Windows System with teTeX-- XFree86 under Linux -- because it allows for superior document previewing. It's not required, but in general, anything that allows for easier screen previewing is going to benefit your work, in terms of the quality of the output. However, there is a tradeoff with speed of editing, which is much quicker on character-mode displays. Having an editor which is slower than molasses in Minnesota can definitely hinder your work.
Anyway, whether or not you are able to view documents easily on-screen, please recycle your paper, and use both sides of each sheet. If possible, purchase recycled photocopy paper to print on. You don't want your workplace to look like a branch office of a paper company.
Remember: Save a tree... kill an editor.
Robert Kiesling
Robert_A._Kiesling@macline.com