How to attach True Type Fonts in TeX Live LaTeX

Question

The problem is: where one can read precise instruction on how to effectively install Windows "Truefonts" (.ttf files) in TeX Live LaTeX environment installed in Windows XP? But please, do not drive me to (from the other hand valuable) article written by S. Kroonenberg called Font installation the shallow way. I know it.

Answer 1

Instead of messing with the font installations, you may want to simply use the XeTeX engine, which is available through TexLive and is able to use the TrueType fonts installed on the system. Since I'm a Linux user myself, I'm not too sure whether it is installed by default or not. Once it is installed, you can compile your documents with e.g.

xelatex -interaction=nonstopmode myfile.tex

instead of the usual

pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode myfile.tex

You may want to configure your editor to use xelatex by default. The font declarations with xelatex are very straightforward. For Example

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setromanfont{TeX Gyre Pagella}
\begin{document}
Testing XeLaTeX!

\end{document}

You will need to know the names of the fonts available on your system. This list of names may help you with that.

Note that TexLive also provides the Times font, which is very similar to Times New Roman, and which you can load simply with \usepackage{mathptmx}. This works with regular pdflatex, so you don't have to install anything. Further, the Helvetica font is very similar to Arial and is available with the helvet package. The LaTeX Font Catalogue provides a good overview of fonts and font packages, many of which are available with TexLive.

Answer 2

The 'standard' way to install fonts in LaTeX is discribed in the fontinstallationguide by using Postscript Type1 fonts. You can use fontforge or tools like ttf2pt1 to create them. There are also scripts like installfont(-tl) doing the job for you.

See also: How to use downloaded fonts with pdfLaTeX on Ubuntu