elfs | Font Queen Rides Again: How to use True Type Fonts with LaTeX

If you're a unix geek, you've probably encountered LaTeX. If you're like me and write stories using a Linux box, you've got only a few choices: OpenOffice, Abiword, or LaTeX. I dislike the first two because they're heavyweight and give you "the power to fiddle endlessly," but they're not really great.

I have discovered (ironic, this) Emacs Muse, a development environment for books. It will automagically generate output in DocBox, LaTeX, and whatever else you want. It will auto-generate PDFs, but it does that by generating LaTeX and calling pdfLaTeX.

But I've always wanted better. And there is better. Enter XeTeX and its accompanying program XeLaTeX. XeLaTex on a properly installed box can use any font installed on the system, once you've given it the list of font paths. With 1,398 True Type fonts on my box, XeLaTeX is truly my cat's meow.

And once it's installed, the syntax is simple. To set the font to "Georgia," just define a font macro:

 \font\fe="Georgia"
 \fe

I haven't figure out much beyond this. The title page still renders in the default. But it's a marvelous start, and it totally changes the way I approach LaTeX. The Gentoo installation was trivial, and the installer told it "use the same font libraries and paths as X." Most excellent.