How to change fonts

Question

I'm sure this is a newbie question, but I can't figure this out. I have tried to follow the advice here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Fonts and here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rf10/pstex/latexcommands.htm

But I can not seem to be able to generate any font change. I either get no change or error messages.

Here is the output of one failed attempt to change the font to Times using this command:

\rmfamily
\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{ptm}

http://pastebin.com/LJ62uC12

Apparently I either don't have a correct package installed or...

The output says " Metric (TFM) file not found." but I am not sure where to go from there.

If you want to use Times you can load one of the several packages, for example mathptmx, newtx (using \usepackage{newtxtext} for text and \usepackage{newtxmath} for math). Your example should work (to see the effect use \rmfamily after the other instruction`. The problem could be a broken installation (and by the way you have an old one: 2009, you might consider to upgrade to a more recent one). — Guido, Dec 26 '12 at 04:22
In my TeXLive installation the tfm file is found at texlive/2011/texmf-dist/fonts/tfm/adobe/times/ptmr7t.tfm. That you should have the fd without the tfm seems like a broken install to me. I suggest to make a fresh install of a current TeXLive distribution. — Stephan Lehmke, Dec 26 '12 at 05:19
Partial duplicate of How do I use a particular font for a small section of text in my document? - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange — user202729, Feb 24 '24 at 13:08

score 8 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

Most of the time, it's advised to load the fonts you want beforehand by loading packages. A list of packages available in most TeX distributions can be found online in The LaTeX Font Catalogue.

Packages will define \rmdefault (roman), \sfdefault (sans-serif) or \ttdefault (monospaced). For example:

\usepackage{tgheros,tgtermes,tgcursor}

Will set TeX Gyre Termes as the roman font, TeX Gyre Heros as the sans-serif font and TeX Gyre Cursor as the monospaced font.

XeTeX/LuaTeX users can also change the font families using the fontspec package: using \setmainfont, \setsansfont or \setmonofont respectively.

\setmainfont{TeX Gyre Termes}\setsansfont{TeX Gyre Heros}\setmonofont{TeX Gyre Cursor}

One can change the default font family with:

\renewcommand*\familydefault{\sfdefault}

However, sometimes one wishes to specify a font directly, with fontspec this is also quite easy:

\fontspec{TeX Gyre Heros}

For Type 1 fonts this is a bit more difficult:

\fontfamily{qhv}\selectfont

More information about font names can be found in this question.

sorry about http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rf10/pstex/latexcommands.htm it’s ~=14 years old, put there for some now-forgotten discussion. i shall add a heading saying that it is unreliable in current tex distros. — wasteofspace, Jan 18 '14 at 14:21

How to change fonts

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