Installing a PostScript printer built-in font

There is a “standard” set of fonts that has appeared in every PostScript printer since the second generation of the type. These fonts (8 families of four text fonts each, and three special-purpose fonts) are of course widely used, because of their simple availability. The set consists of:

• Times family (4 fonts)
• Palatino family (4 fonts)
• New Century Schoolbook family (4 fonts)
• Bookman family (4 fonts)
• Helvetica family (4 fonts)
• Avant Garde (4 fonts)
• Courier family (4 fonts)
• Utopia family (4 fonts)
• Zapf Chancery (1 font)
• Zapf Dingbats (1 font)
• Symbol (1 font)

All these fonts are supported, for LaTeX users, by the psnfss set of metrics and support files in the file lw35nfss.zip on CTAN. Almost any remotely modern TeX system will have some version of psnfss installed, but users should note that the most recent version has much improved coverage of maths with Times (see package mathptmx) and with Palatino (see package mathpazo, as well as a more reliable set of font metrics.

The archive lw35nfss.zip is laid out according to the TDS, so in principle, installation consists simply of “unzipping” the file at the root of a texmf tree.

Documentation of the psnfss bundle is provided in psnfss2e.pdf in the distribution.

FAQ ID: Q-instprinterfont