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Assume I would like to change the font for a section of text, e.g. use Bookman for both headings and paragraphs (similarly to the explanations in this community wiki guide).

If I change the \familydefault, as in section (1), only headings are affected. If on the other hand I select Bookman as the \fontfamily, it affects only paragraph text but not headings (2). Combining both commands gives the desired result (3), as does adding a \normalfont command to \familydefault* (4).

What causes this behaviour? Does \fontfamily set some "currentfont" variable which is not accessed when headings are formatted? And why does changing \familydefault immediately affect headings, but not text?

 

*This was pointed out in a comment by @mpg.

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

%print a _short section of lipsum text
\newcommand{\shlipsum}{%
    \section{A quick brown fox}
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut purus elit, vestibulum ut, placerat ac, adipiscing vitae, felis. Curabitur dictum gravida mauris. Nam arcu libero, nonummy eget, consectetuer id, vulputate a, magna.\\%
}

%reset font to typewriter CM
\newcommand{\resetfont}{\renewcommand{\familydefault}{cmtt}\normalfont}

\begin{document}

\resetfont
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{pbk}  %sets heading only
\shlipsum

\resetfont
\fontfamily{pbk}\selectfont         %sets paragraph text only
\shlipsum

\resetfont
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{pbk}
\fontfamily{pbk}\selectfont
\shlipsum

\resetfont
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{pbk}
\normalfont
\shlipsum

\end{document}
Community
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dgs
  • 2,741

1 Answers1

14

\fontfamily{pbk}\selectfont selects that family from that point for the rest of the current group.

\renewcommand{\familydefault}{pbk} Just redefines that macro and does nothing unless something does \fontfamily{\familydefault}\selectfont. That combination isn't normally done explicitly but is part of \resetfont or \normalfont which heading commands usually use so that they get consistent fonts even if the text at that point in the document is locally using a different font style.

David Carlisle
  • 757,742
  • Thank you, now it makes sense. How could I access the variable set by \fontfamily, i.e. what is its identifier? – dgs Jun 08 '12 at 15:44
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    the definition of fontfamily is \DeclareRobustCommand\fontfamily[1]{\edef\f@family{#1}} so \f@family but you wouldn't normally need to look at that directly – David Carlisle Jun 08 '12 at 16:13
  • Probably not, but it could come in handy for "figuring out what's going on" purposes. Thanks again. – dgs Jun 08 '12 at 16:34
  • @DavidCarlisle: \fontfamily{pbk}\selectfont works fine with pdfLaTeX engine but does not with XeLaTeX. – Say OL Apr 13 '18 at 02:02
  • @SayOL it works identically in xelatex (and at the time this answer was written it would have selected the same font) current xelatex defaults to Unicode (TU) font encoding and there is probably no TU pbk defined (there is no need for such a definition) – David Carlisle Apr 13 '18 at 07:41
  • @DavidCarlisle: I posted a question a few hour ago (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/426300/26458). One suggested to use \fontencoding{T1} but this is not solve the problem since I am planing to use it with complex-script language, Khmer, which requires TU font encoding. So in order to use pbk and others, do we require to define TU for those fonts? – Say OL Apr 13 '18 at 09:33
  • @SayOL the names like pbk are so things work on an IBM PC using 8 letter filenames in 1990. using xetex this century you have no need for it at all. You can refer to your fonts by their natural names. using the fontspec package, you should almost never need to be setting low level macros like \fontfamily or \fontencoding by hand. – David Carlisle Apr 13 '18 at 10:08