Introduction

When LaTeX was young, documents looked quite similar, since there was a precious little choice of fonts. Over time, many new fonts were invented and gained support from LaTeX.

To find the perfect fonts for your documents, visit the LaTeX font catalogue at http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/.

In this chapter, we will see how to choose fonts globally and how to adjust them within the document.

Before we take off, let's take a quick look at basic LaTeX commands for switching between fonts. We keep it very short, as introductory texts usually cover it. Experienced LaTeX users may skip this section.

Basic font commands

Fonts for text have five main attributes:

• Encoding: We covered this in the previous chapter and concluded that T1 encoding is usually a good choice for common Latin text, which can be activated by the following command:

  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

• Family: This is what we we call sets of fonts of the same origin and the same type. You can switch to a font family using one...