Using TrueType fonts with pdflatex/livetex on Mac OS X

My University recently established a set of typographic conventions to be used when producing official documents such as presentations. A Powerpoint template was provided, but that was almost useless to me because I’m more a LaTeX guy. Aiming at building a beamer template compliant with the above conventions, I had to learn how to typeset LaTeX documents using the Trebuchet font in Mac OS X Mavericks equipped with pdflatex and livetex 2014. The steps I took should be independent

of the specific operating system,
of the livetex release, and
of the chosen font, as soon as it belongs to the TrueType family.

First of all, it is advisable to create a temporary directory within which building the font files:

~$ mkdir tmp
~$ cd tmp

The following step consists in finding the TrueType descriptions of the chosen font. This is easy for Mac users, as the corresponding files are shipped with the OS in the /Library/Fonts directory. For a given font there are typically four descriptions, respectively for the standard form and the bold, italic and bold+italic variants. The corresponding files have a name made up of the font name, the considered variant and a ttf extension. Such files should be copied to our temporary directory, taking care of removing spaces in file names and possibily adhering to the convention of adding the suffix “b”, “i”, and “z” for the bold, italic, and bold+italic variants:

~/tmp$ cp /Library/Fonts/Trebuchet*ttf .
~/tmp$ mv Trebuchet\ MS.ttf trebuchet.ttf
~/tmp$ mv Trebuchet\ MS\ Bold.ttf trebuchetb.ttf
~/tmp$ mv Trebuchet\ MS\ Italic.ttf trebucheti.ttf
~/tmp$ mv Trebuchet\ MS\ Bold\ Italic.ttf trebuchetz.ttf

Next, we need to find out where three specific tex-aware directory are within the file system. In order to find out the exact pathnames, which are dependent on the specific texlive release, we can use the kpsewhich utility and set up three environment variables to be used henceforth:

~/tmp$ export TEXMFDIST=`kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFDIST`
~/tmp$ export TEXMFHOME=`kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFHOME`
~/tmp$ export TEXMFSYSVAR=`kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFSYSVAR`

In order to get the metric files for the font to be installed, we need to build some intermediate files, encoded in the adobe font metric format, through the ttf2afm utility:

~/tmp$ ttf2afm -e $TEXMFDIST/fonts/enc/ttf2pk/base/T1-WGL4.enc -o ectrebuchet.afm trebuchet.ttf
~/tmp$ ttf2afm -e $TEXMFDIST/fonts/enc/ttf2pk/base/T1-WGL4.enc -o ectrebucheti.afm trebucheti.ttf
~/tmp$ ttf2afm -e $TEXMFDIST/fonts/enc/ttf2pk/base/T1-WGL4.enc -o ectrebuchetb.afm trebuchetb.ttf
~/tmp$ ttf2afm -e $TEXMFDIST/fonts/enc/ttf2pk/base/T1-WGL4.enc -o ectrebuchetz.afm trebuchetz.ttf

Note that the T1-WGL4.enc encoding table could contain definitions for glyps not included in the font we are installing: in such case, one or more warnings (such as "glyph `ffl' not found") show up in stderr.

The .afm files can now be used in order to produce the font metrics which texlive expects (... means a skipped verbose output):

~/tmp$ afm2tfm ectrebuchet.afm -T $TEXMFDIST/fonts/enc/ttf2pk/base/T1-WGL4.enc ectrebuchet.tfm
...
~/tmp$ afm2tfm ectrebucheti.afm -T $TEXMFDIST/fonts/enc/ttf2pk/base/T1-WGL4.enc ectrebucheti.tfm
...
~/tmp$ afm2tfm ectrebuchetb.afm -T $TEXMFDIST/fonts/enc/ttf2pk/base/T1-WGL4.enc ectrebuchetb.tfm
...
~/tmp$ afm2tfm ectrebuchetz.afm -T $TEXMFDIST/fonts/enc/ttf2pk/base/T1-WGL4.enc ectrebuchetz.tfm

Now that Trutype and font metric files have been generated, we also need to create directories to hold them:

sudo mkdir -p $TEXMFDIST/fonts/truetype/ms
sudo mkdir -p $TEXMFDIST/fonts/tfm/ms

We are now ready to place all built files where texlive expects them to be. Note that $TEXMFDIST will typically point to a system directory, and in this case you will need to get access to it (likely through sudo):

~/tmp$ cp *ttf $TEXMFDIST/fonts/truetype/ms/
~/tmp$ cp *tfm $TEXMFDIST/texlive/2014/texmf-dist/fonts/tfm/ms/

To let texlive aware of the new font it is sufficient to add the following lines at the end of $TEXMFSYSVAR/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map (again, to be likely accessed through sudo):

ectrebuchet Trebuchet " T1Encoding ReEncodeFont " <trebuchet.ttf T1-WGL4.enc
ectrebucheti Trebuchet-Italic " T1Encoding ReEncodeFont " <trebucheti.ttf T1-WGL4.enc
ectrebuchetb Trebuchet-Bold " T1Encoding ReEncodeFont " <trebuchetb.ttf T1-WGL4.enc
ectrebuchetz Trebuchet-BoldItalic " T1Encoding ReEncodeFont " <trebuchetz.ttf T1-WGL4.enc

The last step consists in invoking the mktexlsr utility, which builds a database of files found in specific texlive directories:

sudo mktexlsr
...

To access the new fonts from LaTeX, a new style file has to be created. Although other options are possible, this file typically has the same name of the installed font, and is located in the tex/latex directory under the user texmf tree: thus edit $TEXMFHOME/tex/latex/trebuchet.sty as follows:

\DeclareFontFamily{T1}{trebuchet}{}%
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{trebuchet}{b}{n}{<->ectrebuchetb}{}%
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{trebuchet}{b}{it}{<-> ectrenuchetz}{}%
%% bold extended (bx) are simply bold
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{trebuchet}{bx}{n}{<->ssub * trebuchet/b/n}{}%
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{trebuchet}{bx}{it}{<->ssub * trebuchet/b/it}{}%
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{trebuchet}{m}{n}{<-> ectrebuchet}{}%
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{trebuchet}{m}{it}{<-> ectrebucheti}{}%
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}%
\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{trebuchet}%
\renewcommand{\sfdefault}{trebuchet}%

To test that the installation is fine create a simple LaTeX document using the trebuchet package, such as the following one:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{trebuchet}
\begin{document}
Test
\end{document}

and pdflatex it to check that no errors rise up and that the produced PDF actually contains the new font (either visually or through an utility such as pdffonts). Finally, remember to clean up things by simply removing the temporary directory:

~/tmp$ cd ..
~/tmp$ rm -rf tmp