How do I use a particular font for a small section of text in my document?

Question

The standard font packages make global changes to the fonts in my document. What if I want to use a particular font for just a portion of my text?

1. How do I find the right name of the font?
2. How do I select the font?
3. How do I restrict the scope of the font change?

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There are separate answers for different flavors of TeX (quick links):

• Regular LaTeX (including pdfLaTeX)
• XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX
• ConTeXt MkIV

Answer 1

Regular LaTeX

Finding the font name

This is actually the hardest part. When you load a regular font package like helvet (which sets the default sans serif font to a Helvetica clone) it issues commands to set up the font using an internal name, which is hidden to regular users. These names traditionally use a system of three or four letter lower case names for each font family. Usually these names are documented in documentation associated with the font.

Here is a list of the most common fonts, and their codes:

Family       Font Name
pag          Avant Garde
fvs          Bitstream Vera Sans
pbk          Bookman
bch          Charter
ccr          Computer Concrete
cmr          Computer Modern
pcr          Courier
mdugm        Garamond
phv          Helvetica
fi4          Inconsolata
lmr          Latin Modern
LinuxBiolinumT-OsF     Linux Biolinum (used to be 'fxb')
LinuxLibertineT-OsF    Linux Libertine (used to be 'fxl')
pnc          New Century Schoolbook
ppl          Palatino
ptm          Times
uncl         Uncial
put          Utopia
pzc          Zapf Chancery

(Based on this post in the PhilTeX forums.)

If you don't find any documentation for the font, as a last resort (or a first resort once you know what you're doing) you can open the .sty file that actually loads the font and see for yourself what the internal font family name is (or you could search inside it with grep). Here are two examples:

From helvet.sty: the at the end of the package is the line

\renewcommand{\sfdefault}{phv}

This sets the default sans font (\sfdefault) to the phv family, so phv is the internal name of the font.

From PTSansCaption.sty

\renewcommand{\sfdefault}{PTSansCaption-TLF}

Here the internal name is closer to its actual name: PTSansCaption-TLF.

Both of these examples have shown the code for changing the sans serif font. If the font package changes the roman or mono font you would look for the following commands respectively

\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{...}
\renewcommand{\ttdefault}{...}

Selecting the font

To select a font, you use the following commands:

\fontfamily{<familyname>}\selectfont

It's often useful to wrap this in a macro:

\newcommand*{\myfont}{\fontfamily{<familyname>}\selectfont}

Restricting the scope of the selection

You can always restrict the scope of font changing commands by enclosing the text in braces:

{\fontfamily{<familyname>}\selectfont ...}

or if using a command

{\myfont ...}

or, to make the scope of the command more visible in your file if you don't have a brace-matching editor

\begingroup
  \myfont ...
\endgroup

If this is something you will be doing a lot, it would make more sense to turn it into a proper environment:

\newenvironment{myfont}{\fontfamily{<familyname>}\selectfont}{\par}

Then you use it like any other environment:

\begin{myfont}
  Some text in the new font.
\end{myfont}

Answer 2

XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX

The appearance of XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX has simplified font selection greatly for LaTeX users, since any font installed on your system can be used with these engines using the fontspec package to load the font.

Both XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX assume by default UTF-8 input, so you should not load the inputenc package when using them, and you should save your source files as UTF-8.

A basic document will therefore look like the following:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{<any font on your system>}
\begin{document}
...
\end{document}

Selecting fonts globally

For a whole document, you can set the roman font, the sans serif font and the monospace font with the following commands:

\setmainfont[<font features>]{<name of font>} % sets the roman font
\setsansfont[<font features>]{<name of font>} % sets the sans font
\setmonofont[<font features>]{<name of font>} % sets the monospace font

Selecting fonts locally

If you want to use a font for a small section of your document it's best to define a new font family.

\newfontfamily\myfont[<font features>]{<name of font>}

This sets up a switch called \myfont which changes the font to that font. (It is also possible to select a font directly using the \fontspec command, but this is generally to be avoided, since the \newfontfamily method is much more efficient.)

Font Features

Since fontspec package provides access to OpenType fonts, it is able to provide access to many of the special features that come with these fonts. These features can be selected using the optional argument of any font selection command. See the fontspec documentation for more details. I'll outline a couple of commonly used features here.

• [Ligatures=TeX] This feature allows you to use regular TeX ligatures (which are not turned on by default in fontspec. Especially if you are used to e.g. typing LaTeX style quotation marks or -- and --- instead of typing the actual characters directly, you should always turn on this option.
• [Numbers=OldStyle] This feature turns on lower case numbers
• [Scale=MatchLowercase] This feature is used to scale e.g. the sans or mono font to match (in this example) the lower case characters of the roman font. Another option is MatchUppercase; alternatively a numeric scaling value can be given.

See the fontspec documentation for a full description of the wealth of features that can be specified.

If you are setting separate roman, mono, and sans fonts or creating new font families, you often want to have the same font features specified for all. You can do this by using the \defaultfontfeatures command:

\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX} % makes this a feature for all selected fonts

Finding the name of the font

If you are using system fonts, you can use the name of the font as it appears in any application on your system. (On a Mac, these are usually the fonts in /Library/Fonts; on Windows they are usually in \Windows\Fonts; on Linux the usual place is /usr/local/share/fonts. For example:

\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}

There's really no sense in listing font names here, but I'll add some examples of what the names can look like:

• Arial Rounded MT Bold
• DejaVu Sans Mono
• Florencesans SC Black

Notice that spaces that normally appear in the name of the font must also be present when you choose the font using fontspec.

Restricting the scope of the selection

You can always restrict the scope of font changing commands by enclosing the text in braces:

{\myfont ...}

or, to make the scope of the command more visible in your file if you don't have a brace-matching editor

\begingroup
  \myfont ...
\endgroup

If this is something you will be doing a lot, it would make more sense to turn it into a proper environment:

\newenvironment{myfont}{\myfont}{\par}

Then you use it like any other environment:

\begin{myfont}
  Some text in the new font.
\end{myfont}

Answer 3

ConTeXt MkIV

In ConTeXt MkIV it is easy to use a font for a small section. For larger parts of text I would recommend to use the Simplefonts module or to write typescripts, because larger parts probably contain font switches that change the style.

How do I find the right name of the font?

First you have to install the font, if not already done. On Unix you can use the directory $HOME/.fonts for a per user or e.g. /usr/local/share/fonts for a system wide installation. You have to point the environment variable OSFONTDIR to the directory where the fonts can be found:

export OSFONTDIR="/usr/local/share/fonts;$HOME/.fonts"

Then run

mtxrun --script fonts --reload

to regenerate the font database. Now you can query the database. This gives you a list of all available fonts:

mtxrun --script fonts --list --all

Here are the first ten lines of this list:

ams                   wncysc10              wncysc10.afm
amsbold               wncyb10               wncyb10.afm
amsmedium             wncysc10              wncysc10.afm
antpoltbold           antpoltbold           antpolt-bold.otf
antpoltbolditalic     antpoltbolditalic     antpolt-bolditalic.otf
antpoltcondbold       antpoltcondbold       antpoltcond-bold.otf
antpoltcondbolditalic antpoltcondbolditalic antpoltcond-bolditalic.otf
antpoltconditalic     antpoltconditalic     antpoltcond-italic.otf
antpoltcondregular    antpoltcondregular    antpoltcond-regular.otf
antpoltexpdbold       antpoltexpdbold       antpoltexpd-bold.otf

You get three columns the second being the normalised (all lower-case, no special characters, no spaces) name and the third being the file name (in lower-case).

You can run the list through grep or use the built-in mechanism to search for particular fonts:

mtxrun --script fonts --list --pattern=deli*

gives

deliciousroman  deliciousroman  /home/me/.fonts/Delicious-Roman.otf

How do I select the font?

Since we deal just with one font without bold or italic font switches (however, the selected font can of course be bold or italic) we can simply use \definefont:

\definefont [delicious] [name:deliciousroman]

This defines a macro \delicious which switches to the given font. The name: prefix is used to refer to the normalised name in the font list (second column). One can also use the file: prefix and use the file name (third column) without the path.

How do I restrict the scope of the font change?

You can use braces, \start \stop, \begingroup \endgroup or any other grouping mechanism.

Here is a complete example which uses the font Delicious-Roman (an OpenType font).

\definefont [delicious] [name:deliciousroman]

\starttext

\start
    \delicious
    \input knuth
\stop

\input knuth

\stoptext

The output:

The right box indicates that indeed the requested font is being used. Further information can be found one the ConTeXt wiki - Fonts in LuaTeX and the Chapter on fonts.