Fonts - Old Content

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Where to find fonts

Available Free Fonts

• Free Math Fonts : overview of different free Math fonts; links to other free fonts
• GFS Didot : Latin, full set of polytonik Greek, small caps, oldstyle figures, full f-ligatures (Module for ConTeXt)
• TeX Gyre : a set of great text fonts by our GUST friends, based on URW's free PostScript standard fonts for GhostScript.
• Foto Alfa : some TeX related fonts from Poland (Antykwa Toruńska. Antykwa Półtawskiego, Kurier, Iwona...)
• Libertine Open Fonts Project: GPL/OFL serif font
• SIL International : great Unicode fonts for scholars by SIL (Gentium, Doulos, Charis, etc.)
• GreekKeys : links to polytonic Greek fonts
• Scholar's Fonts : Font for Scholars (Latin, Germanic languages, Greek, Hebrew and Linguistics)
• Junicode : Junius-Unicode, a font for medievalists
• FreeLang fonts : fonts for exotic languages
• Blambot : Comic fonts
• Chank : some free Chank fonts
• FontFace : free fonts
• DaFont : more free fonts
• Divide by Zero : more fonts
• TypOasis : lots of nice fonts, but a bit hard to find (have a look at designers Apostrophic Lab, Manfred Klein and Dieter Steffmann)
• Kristine's Font Organization : find a font in a sorted directory
• FontLover : font news portal site
• Lido : OpenType and TrueType typeface by Storm Type Foundry, free for non-commercial use. Support.
• Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources : find fonts by Unicode character range
• exljbris Free Quality Font Foundry by Jos Buivenga
• STIX Fonts Beta download of the STIX-Fonts
• ... many more to be added ...

How to use fonts in ConTeXt

The ConTeXt way of handling fonts are TypeScripts. It’s a system of abstraction and aliases, which may seem “strange” at first for LaTeX users.

• If you happen to use XeTeX then you can forget almost all the magic and start using your system fonts (see Fonts_in_XeTeX).
• If you use LuaTeX, see Fonts_in_LuaTex
• If you want to keep using pdfTeX, read on.

Font support & configuration

Type 1 fonts

• Using psnfss metrics in ConTeXt
• Matt Gushee's introduction to virtual fonts, especially for getting expert fonts to work.
• URW Garamond
• Lucida : large font family designed by Bigelow & Holmes; suitable e.g. for presentations
• Installing Expert Fonts: Minion Pro by Idris Samawi Hamid; contains step-by-step instructions, from preinstallation to writing typescripts
• Storm Type Foundry : support of selected fonts

True Type fonts

• Integrating TrueType Fonts into ConTeXt by Thomas A. Schmitz (PracTeX Journal)
• Installing a TrueType font, step by step. If you just need to install a TrueType font, this may be what you are looking for.

Basic Hints

Some hints by Taco from the mailing list on 2005-11-20:

Q: How up to date or out of date is the information in mfonts manual?

A: It looks like it is still quite up-to-date, but some of the examples it gives may no longer be the very best and latest way of doing things, and possibly there are some new developments that do not get as much attention as desired (like texfont, and the issues arising from font map files). Overall, the document appears accurate, though.

An important thing to remember is this:

ConTeXt does not share font metric conventions with LaTeX.

(at one point it started doing so, like supporting the Karl Berry naming scheme and the PSNFSS style font family names, but that has since been abandoned).

Another important thing is that it also does not share font map files with LaTeX and, specifically,

ConTeXt does not make pdfetex read pdftex.map.

(this is at the root of a great many problems reported by users only familiar with PSNFSS)

The preferred format for metric files in ConTeXt is

<vendor>/<familyname>/<encoding>-<fontname>.tfm

for metrics and

<encoding>-<vendor>-<familyname>.map

for the mapping files.

• <fontname> is usually derived from the font source (afm or ttf),
• <encoding> is a 'controlled' list, (see Encodings and Regimes)
• <vendor> and <familyname> are user-supplied (at install time).

There are ways to trick ConTeXt into using different conventions, but if you do that you are likely to run into trouble.

Hints by Language

• general: Encodings and Regimes
• Arabic and Hebrew (Idris? other ArabTeX specialists?)
• Chinese
• Czech
• Greek
• Russian
• Vietnamese

Unsorted links

• font installation with texfont by Pragma
• ConTeXt's font mechanism in detail by Pragma
• ConTeXt basics for users: Font styles by Aditya Mahajan (2007)
• making outlines by Pragma
• Here you can try out several TeX fonts online (PDF interface!)
• Troubleshooting: solving TeXfont problems.
• Character Protrusion (also known as hanging or font handling) is a more subtle typographic effect.
• Font Handling Internals
• Adam Lindsay's page focuses on typography (OpenType, Unicode etc.), esp. on MacOS X
• Bill McClain's ConTeXt beginners page has also a lot about fonts
• Pseudo Small Caps by Vit Zyka
• otfinst - a sample ruby script for using OpenType fonts in ConTeXt
• Understanding how fonts work in ConTeXt
• Fonts rely on Encodings and Regimes, and it helps to know what happens underneath the hood, from time to time.
• In newer distributions, map files belong in …/fonts/map/pdftex/context!
• Don't forget to look at cont-sys.tex!