Well in short, no, but hear me out.
LaTeX is brilliant for typesetting but one of its weaknesses has always been fonts. Not how it treats fonts internally – that’s great – but switching between typefaces. For those who have never tried, trying to use a standard TrueType font in LaTeX (or heaven forbid a fully-featured OpenType font) involves converting the font shapes to a special format, then telling LaTeX which shapes correspond to which font styles, and then adding some new commands to let you switch typefaces. One of those IT tasks where someone on a mailing list says it’s easy and then proceeds to give twenty detailed instructions.
But as luck would have, no sooner had I cracked the secret of LaTeX fonts, managing to get the Adobe Type Basics working with all the bells and whistles, then MikTeX started including XeTeX. XeTeX is a compiler like LaTeX but it enables users to easily (by LaTeX standards) switch fonts. So now instead of messing around with font definitions files and conversion scripts and other bits of voodoo, you simply type
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Calisto MT}
into your preamble, compile with XeTeX and voila! A PDF set with Calisto or for that matter any font you wish. Just change “Calisto MT” above to the font as it’s named on your system (e.g. in the font selection drop-down of your word processor).
But is this necessarily a good thing? Ultimately yes, of course it is, but there is one big trouble-spot.
Part of the appeal of LaTeX is that everything works so well together. The default line spacing, kerning, margins, etc have all been designed to give nice looking pages and this extends to the default font, Computer Modern. Crucially CM comes with a full set of styles (small caps, slanted, italics, boldface, math…), all of which work harmoniously together. If people start using XeTeX to switch fonts willy-nilly, next thing you know someone will be writing beautifully justified and spaced lines of Comic Sans. Not what I’d call progress.
So to summarise:
- With XeTeX, you can easily include any font you want in a LaTeX document
- Don’t do it just because you can
