Does \setmainfont{Times New Roman} Produce Very Close to the Real Thing?

Question

In Times new roman font? the sole answer (and with many upvotes) states "Compile with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, and use: \usepackage{fontspec} \setmainfont{Times New Roman} This is true Times New Roman, via modern TeX engines."

A while back, if someone wanted to approximate the real Times New Roman font, there was \usepackage{times} (which has since been deprecated); now, \usepackage{mathptmx} often seems to be recommended as a substitute, but not without some lamenting; see, for example, the OP's commentary in the above post: ``But everything I've tried makes ugly pseudo-times new roman font in comparison. What I've tried based on the research I've done so far;''

There are others, such as txfonts and newtx, for example.

But \setmainfont{Times New Roman} does seem to do a very good job. Consider:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec,lipsum}
\setmainfont{Times New Roman}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\end{document}

produces:

QUESTION: Is Leo Liu, who posted the only answer in the above post, correct; that is, does invoking Times New Roman with fontspec give you (close to at least) the real Times New Roman font? Are there any drawbacks to it aside from not having small caps? May it be used free of charge for commercial projects?

Thank you.

Answer 1

It will use the font installed as Times New Roman in your system, that is, the same font as a word processor or browser would use when requested for a font of that name. (Note if you don't have Times New Roman installed, eg you have Times Roman or a clone such as nimbus) then Times New Roman may still work via aliases or may not depending on the system. Note that Times New Roman (an old version) is available on non windows platforms such as linux via the microsoft corefonts package.

As for small caps I would expect that they work, although it depends which font you have installed on your system that is, or is aliased to, Times New Roman.

On this Windows box using cygwin xelatex in texlive 2024 I get

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Times New Roman}

\begin{document}

One Two Three \textsc{Four Five Six}

\end{document}

and the font used is:

pdffonts file.pdf
name                        type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
--------------------------- ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
TJGRCK+TimesNewRomanPSMT    CID TrueType      Identity-H       yes yes yes      4  0

Older packages such as mathptmx that you mention are referencing 8 bit legacy tex fonts for pdftex, but you are specifying system fonts for luatex or xelatex using the fontspec package.

Note however that you have just specified Times New Roman as the main serif font, fontspec will guess italic and bold fonts based on this, but sans serif, monospace and math will all still be based on latin modern, so (especially math) will look horrible.

If instead you use \usepackage{newtx} The main serif font will be based on the URW Times Roman clone (as used for Times font in ghostscript) but in addition suitable matching sans serif and math will be set up.

Answer 2

If you set the font to Times New Roman, you will (if the MS Core fonts for the Web, Microsoft Windows, or Microsoft Office are installed) get the same font that any word processor or browser would use if you request Times New Roman. On some Linux systems, you would need to install the version that Microsoft released gratis in the ’90s. Also, some Linux boxes need a bit of extra set-up for XeTeX to see fonts in both the system and TeX directories.

There is only one difference: Word and most other software follows PostScript’s definition of a “point.” TeX calls this a “big point” instead, or bp. Therefore, if you set the font size to 10pt, you will get slightly smaller text than expected, and to get the same size as if you’d selected 10-point Times New Roman in Word, you would instead use something like the fontsize=10bp option of Koma-Script.

If you have the correct copyrighted font files on your box, you might be able to use them in text mode with PDFTeX through the winfonts package, although last I checked, this was obsolete. Otherwise, any version of Times should be nearly identical. The newtx package is the most full-featured and up-to-date of these for legacy 8-bit TeX.