Chapter 9. Using Fonts

The appearance of your text is significantly determined by the base font. You may choose a font that's especially clear and readable for a long piece of writing, or a fancy font for a greeting card. Your job application letter might use a very clear and serious font, whereas a mathematical article requires fonts with a lot of symbols and a text font that fits well with them.

Until now, we have been covering the logical properties of fonts. Though we always used the LaTeX standard font, we switched, for instance, from roman to sans-serif, or to typewriter, learned how to make text bold, italic, or slanted, but we never left the standard set of fonts.

In this chapter, we shall learn how to:

• Choose other sets of fonts for the whole document

• Load font packages for specific shapes

During this, we will also:

• See how to install additional fonts

• Look at various fonts and learn how to use them

• Speak about encoding of input text and of fonts in the output

Let's start discussing the encodings...