This website is no longer maintained. Its content may be obsolete. Please visit http://home.cern/ for current CERN information.
This section covers the user commands in LaTeXe for specifying fonts, both in text as in mathematics. We also mention some of the more popular fonts packages and say a few words on compatibility with LaTeX 2.09.
The first question you can naturally ask yourself is why new font commands were introduced at all. To answer this question let us mention that LaTeX 2.09 font commands had a few idiosyncrasies:
{\it foo} rather than \it{foo}, which
is unlike the syntax of (most) other LaTeX commands
(safe the size-changing series), which are specified with arguments;
\bf\sf produces medium-weight sans, ie. only the inner
font command is honored;
\tiny\tt produces tiny roman, since it was assumed that
at such a small size the difference is hardly visible, so that
one can as well use a font already loaded;
{\em my text\/}, and even this is not
correct in all circumstances.
The size changing commands remain unchanged (ie. \large, \scriptsize, etc. are still valid).
These commands do not have the problems of the LaTeX 2.09 commands, because:
\textbf{\textsf{text}} produces bold
sans;
{\tiny\texttt{text}} produces tiny
typewriter;
\emph{text} does not need \/.
\textbf{\texttt{text}} produces
medium typewriter for lack of a bold Computer Modern typewriter font,
but at least LaTeXe warns you about the substitution.
In the area of math fonts, LaTeXe provides the following new commands:
Note that these commands do not work outside mathematics.
It is now relatively easy (if you have the fonts) to replace Computer Modern with other font families. Various packages for popular fonts are already available, for example:
\usepackage{times} provides Adobe Times,
\usepackage{palatino} Adobe Palatino,
\usepackage{lucidbrb} Y&Y's LucidBright and
LucidaNewMath, etc.;
\usepackage{amssymb} provides the AMS fonts;
\usepackage{pandora} allows you to use the Pandora fonts;
\usepackage{euler} lets you experiment with Hermann
Zapf's Euler font family.
LaTeX 2.09's old font commands (\rm, \bf, etc.) are still available in LaTeXe, but they are not part of the ``kernel''. They are now defined in the document class files, where the definitions of the size changing commands, like \huge, \tiny, have always resided. It is thus up to the document designer to define how the old font commands behave. Note, however, that for the ``standard classes'' (article, book, etc.) the old font commands behave as they did in LaTeX 2.09.
One more word about about LaTeX 2.09 compatibility. A document beginning with \documentstyle is run in compatibility mode, which emulates LaTeX without NFSS. If you want to emulate LaTeX with NFSS you should say:
\documentstyle[newlfont]{...}