fontspackages
Palatino (or some copy of it) is very easy to use in pdfLatex — just use package mathpazo and you're set to go.
How come Minion doesn't have such an easy-to-use package? I tried to install it using a step-by-step guide, but in the end it complained about missing some font file. And it took me a couple of hours just to get there.
I was able to install on windows (with MikTeX 2.8), using the instructions with the CTAN package. I don't remember the details, but it wasn't hard. I have the cygwin unix emulation environment installed, but I don't recall if it was necessary to use it.
More details:
kpsewhich:
use the miktex settings tool (probably best to use the (admin) version) to add
a local root directory (eg., C:\miktexlocal\), and use this as the local path.
LCDF typetools for windows: as is mentioned on the LCDF website, you can get unofficial win32 binaries from ftp://akagi.ms.u-tokyo.ac.jp/pub/TeX/win32/
Making directories, copying files, moving files, etc: you can do all of this through windows explorer.
Adding a line to updmap.cfg: Use the command initexmf --admin --edit-config-file updmap
You could start by loading mathdesign, afterwards you may change the text font. For example:
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage[charter]{mathdesign}
\renewcommand*{\rmdefault}{fnc}
\begin{document}
\blindmathpaper
\end{document}
Best Answer
The Palatino font used with LaTeX is actually a free clone. As a result, both the font itself and the support files can be included directly in TeX distributions. It is this clone that is loaded by
On the other hand, Minion Pro is a commercial font. As Philipp points out, there is a package containing the support files that you can download from CTAN. However, that still requires the fonts themselves.
The need for font metric files is a difficult when using TeX, which is why most people are moving to using either XeTeX or LuaTeX when they want to load system fonts. The
fontspecpackage makes this easy in LaTeX, and so most of us would avoid the issues with generating font metric files for pdfTeX nowadays.