Use of arial font

[Salem]

Dear group,

Greetings,


I wanted to switch from the default font of LaTex to arial for my
documents. I used the command "\usepackage{arial}" at the preamble of
the document (package monotype is already installed on my system).
However, I end up with the default font (and no error message is
reoprted). Any helpful suggesteion would be appreciated.

Salem

[Harry Schmidt]

Post by Salem
I wanted to switch from the default font of LaTex to arial for my
documents.

No comment on that ...

Post by Salem
I used the command "\usepackage{arial}" at the preamble of
the document (package monotype is already installed on my system).

Does the monotype-package also include the fonts or only the metrics?
Are the fonts installed seperately?

Post by Salem
However, I end up with the default font (and no error message is
reoprted). Any helpful suggesteion would be appreciated.

Have you changed the default font to sans-serif?

\renewcommand*{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}


Harry

[Bob Tennent]

Post by Harry Schmidt

Post by Salem
I wanted to switch from the default font of LaTex to arial for my
documents.

No comment on that ...

I'll comment on it: don't. Apart from the fact that for long documents
any sans serif font is usually undesirable, why use Arial, of all
typefaces? Check out what experts think of Arial:

http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html

Suggestions:

+ if you must use an Arial-like typeface, use Helvetica
+ if you must use a sans serif face, use a more elegant one, like Optima

If you don't like the "default" font, fair enough, but please re-consider
why you want to switch to Arial.

Bob T.

[William F. Adams]

Someone once said, ``Helvetica isn't readable, merely decipherable.'' Arial
suffers from the same problems (which are mostly a matter of how its spaced ---
David Kindersley applied his LOGOS system to Helvetica and got amazing
improvements in readability).

Univers, Frutiger, Optima would all be better choices --- even Verdana or Vera
Sans, and of course there's Lucida Sans...

William

[chris ciotti]

Post by William F. Adams
Univers, Frutiger, Optima would all be better choices --- even Verdana or Vera
Sans, and of course there's Lucida Sans...
William

You could also set a very readable document in Gill Sans.

--chris

[William F. Adams]

Post by chris ciotti
You could also set a very readable document in Gill Sans.

Excellent point. Any of the more humanly spaced sans works better than the more
mechanical lineale or grotesk sans.

William

[Salem]

Dear group,

I appreciate your inputs on this matter. To make the story short, I'm
a big fan of LaTeX and its wonderful font output. I just wanted to see
the difference. I tried Times but the output was not as good as the
deafult latex font. i'm a simple user of latex but i try to get way
from ms word.

Thanks all for your inputs


Salem

Post by William F. Adams

Post by chris ciotti
You could also set a very readable document in Gill Sans.

Excellent point. Any of the more humanly spaced sans works better than the more
mechanical lineale or grotesk sans.
William

[Malte Rosenau]

Post by Salem
I wanted to switch from the default font of LaTex to arial for my
documents. I used the command "\usepackage{arial}" at the
preamble of the document (package monotype is already installed
on my system). However, I end up with the default font (and no
error message is reoprted). Any helpful suggesteion would be
appreciated.

You have to buy the Arial PostScript fonts from AGFA/Monotype to
make this package work (which is a waste of money IMHO). Try
Helvetica instead

\usepackage{helvet}
\renewcommand*{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}

Both packages will use the orignal CM math fonts, so this doesn't
really work if you have math in your documents. I'd recommend to
use the free cmbright package instead. You can also buy TeX font
packages from MicroPress

http://www.micropress-inc.com/fonts.htm

Kind regards,

Malte