Installation of Type 1 Computer Modern Fonts

This note discusses the use of Type 1 PostScript versions of the Computer Modern Fonts to view and print documents created using the TeX mathematical typesetting software.

Why use Type 1 fonts?

Most TeX implementations support the .pk bitmapped fonts generated by rendering metafont sources directly. Due to differences between printers, it was necessary to prepare bitmaps specifically for each type of printer as well as for each resolution. PostScript printers can use resolution and device independent fonts to produce bitmaps that are tuned to the printer's characteristics. PostScript supports two main types of fonts:

Availability of Type 1 fonts for TeX

The BaKoMa font family is a set of Type 1 PostScript fonts that is free for non-commercial use and can be downloaded from the CTAN archives. The BaKoMa fonts include some glyphs that are not part of the CM fonts (they were generated from an early version of the DC fonts), but the hinting is not as good as the manually hinted fonts from Blue Sky Research and Y & Y. The latter also include glyphs not present in the CM fonts. Y & Y also sells MathTime and Lucida font families.

The following announcment is from Blue Sky Research:

We are also delighted to announce that we are preparing to release the complete set of Computer Modern PostScript fonts into the public domain. We are currently collaborating with the American Mathematical Society, Y & Y, Inc, and a consortium of scientific societies and publishing houses to make possible the release of these fonts to the world wide scientific community. This consortium is also working together towards the release into the public domain, of the AMS PostScript font set. The American Mathematical Society has agreed to coordinate the public availability of both sets of fonts which will be distributed via the FTP and WWW Internet servers of Blue Sky, Y & Y, The American Mathematical Society and the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). We anticipate that the CMPS fonts will be available to the public before the end of February. The AMS font set is slated for release in the third quarter of 1997.

PostScript viewers

Display PostScript from Adobe is available for unix workstations. NeXT OpenStep uses Display PostScript for all rendering operations. For systems using X-Windows, Display PostScript may be implemented for generic X-servers, or as a server extension. GhostView is the generic name for front-end programs that use the Aladdin Ghostscript interpreter. GhostView front-ends have been implemented for Microsoft Windows and X-Windows platforms.

For typical TeX article, the size of the document is a small fraction (10--100k) of the combined size (1--2M) of the associated Type 1 font files. For such documents, it is important to minimize unnecessary copying of the fonts, both to reduce processing time and to conserve disk space.

Viewing TeX output using GhostView

This combination is freely available for a wide range of systems. To use the Type 1 Computer Modern fonts, the following steps are required:
  1. install the font files (.pfa or .pfb) in a suitable directory.
  2. create the FontMap file. On systems such as unix where the case of filenames is important, aliases should be created so that both upper- and lower-case names (e.g, CMR10 and cmr10 are recognized.
  3. configure ghostscript to include the new fonts in the file search path (-I flag).

The format of the FontMap file is described in the user documentation provided with ghostscript. Map file templates suitable for editing to use with ghostscript (FontMap fragment) are included with the Bakoma fonts in the ``etc'' subdirectory.