I'm considering purchasing a font from Hoefler & Frere-Jones for my thesis (the font is called Requiem).
Does anybody have any experience with H&FJ fonts? In particular:
- Are there any issues that I should expect to encounter? How did you resolve them?
- I'm assuming that the font I'm looking at doesn't have all the characters I use, including Greek and math characters. Can LaTeX default to Computer Modern whenever the a character is not found in Requiem? Would that look good?
- Are certain flavours of LaTeX better for this task? I currently use pdfLaTeX, but would I get better results with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX?
Best Answer
I have no experice with fonts from H&FJ, but I've licensed a few from a foundry that they collaborate with quite often. I haven't encountered anything I would call an issue (in 3 or so years, LuaLaTeX only). Technically, there isn't a difference between a commercial font and a ›free‹ one in terms of likeliness of causing trouble.
In your case, the font is probably going to be in OpenType format. That's the format pdfLaTeX isn't able to handle. You may convert the font (back) to Type1 or, if that's prohibited by the EULA, have the foundry provide you with Type1 files -- but a lot of the things that make OpenType fonts fun to use will get lost in the translation, or at least become harder to access. IMHO, there are a number of good reasons for switching to Xe/LuaLaTeX (unless you have reasons why you really can't move away from pdfTeX). Being able to use OpenType fonts is one of them.
Computer Modern isn't a font you'd want to use as a companion for Requiem, as visually, they don't have anything in common. Choose one that's rooted in the same period (the Renaissance). Minion is likely to be a good choice: you can use Minion itself for the Greek; for the math you can use one of the math packages that were made to be used with Minion (most notably Minion Math by Typoma).