As detailed in the book
"The LaTeX companion", because of the large number of special signs
and characters used by LaTeX, if one wishes to use LaTeX for
typesetting mathematical and chemical formulae, rather than merely
standard running text, there is not a plethora of
choices. Basically, there are three possibilities:
Use the "standard" LaTeX fonts. This is the easiest solution,
since all LaTeX installations have these fonts available, and they
contain all the necessary special characters and signs. Further,
these fonts are available at no extra cost. However, they are
regarded as a bit "ugly" by many people.
Use the Adobe PostScript Times (New) Roman font. To work well
both on screen and for printing, this requires access to at least
the .pfb or .pfa files for the Adobe Times New Roman,
Helvetica and Courier fonts. These come with the Adobe Type Manager,
Adobe Acrobat and other programs, but are not freely available. It
also requires some kind of solution for mathematical formulae, the
best of which is to buy the MathTime fonts from Y&Y, which
complement the Times New Roman font with lots and lots of signs and
characters for typesetting formulae, chemical and mathematical. This
solution looks nicer than the standard LaTeX fonts, but is tricky to
install and costs money (although not a lot).
Buy the Lucida fonts from Y&Y, which look good, are easier to
install and contain all the necessary signs and characters for
typesetting LaTeX text and formulae.
While solution number 3 may look as the easiest and best, the Times
font is becoming standard within the OECD and was chosen for use
with the TDB project for this reason, and because it looks better
than the standard LaTeX fonts.
To use the Adobe PostScript font "Times New Roman" for running text
in a document, use the LaTeX package "times", inserting the
following in your document preamble:
\usepackage{times}
To see these fonts in a nice way, one needs to let the program
dvips (for making PostScript output from LaTeX .dvi files) and
Ghostscript (for interpreting PostScript) have the .pfb or .pfa
files for the relevant fonts (Times New Roman, Times New Roman
Italic, Times New Roman Bold, Times New Roman Bold Italic, Courier,
Courier Bold etc. etc.). The documentation for dvips and ghostscript
will tell you how to do this.
To use the MathTime PostScript font with LaTeX for typesetting
formulae etc.,
use the LaTeX mathtime packages plus some others, inserting the
following in your document preamble: