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Installing LaTeX Winfonts on Linux or OS X

The Windows default fonts like Georgia or Verdana aren’t completely bad and still mark today’s standard for lots of applications. Sometimes, one might have the crazy idea of wanting to use them in LaTeX – be it because style rules dictate it, or because one just likes their look.

For this purpose, the “Winfonts” package exists, but it only provides installation instructions for Windows and is not installable through TeX Live. So this guide will walk you through the necessary steps to use Winfonts with TeX Live on Linux or OS X.

Update: You should probably consider using LuaLaTeX, which can handle TrueType fonts directly. Thanks to Clemens for pointing this out in the comments.

  • We’re gonna install the package only for our own user account, so that its files don’t mess with the global TeX tree. This requires you to first determine the path of your TEXMFHOME by running kpsewhich --var-value TEXMFHOME. To change this directory, you have to edit your texmf.cnf file, whose location depends from distribution to distribution: On Debian, you add files to /etc/texmf/texmf.d and run update-texmf afterwards; with the current BasicTeX for OS X, you just edit /usr/local/texlive/2014basic/texmf.cnf.

  • Get the Winfonts package from CTAN and extract its contents to the TEXMFHOME directory.

  • Symlink the fonts from the following table to fonts/truetype/public/msttcorefonts inside your TEXMFHOME. On Debian-based Linux distributions, you can get them through the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package and they will reside in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts. On OS X, you can find them in /Library/Fonts, but will have to adjust the symlink’s names according to this scheme:

Short name for TeX Long name
andalemo.ttf Andale Mono.ttf
arial.ttf Arial.ttf
arialbd.ttf Arial Bold.ttf
arialbi.ttf Arial Bold Italic.ttf
ariali.ttf Arial Italic.ttf
ariblk.ttf Arial Black.ttf
comic.ttf Comic Sans MS.ttf
comicbd.ttf Comic Sans MS Bold.ttf
cour.ttf Courier New.ttf
courbd.ttf Courier New Bold.ttf
courbi.ttf Courier New Bold Italic.ttf
couri.ttf Courier New Italic.ttf
georgia.ttf Georgia.ttf
georgiab.ttf Georgia Bold.ttf
georgiai.ttf Georgia Italic.ttf
georgiaz.ttf Georgia Bold Italic.ttf
impact.ttf Impact.ttf
times.ttf Times New Roman.ttf
timesbd.ttf Times New Roman Bold.ttf
timesbi.ttf Times New Roman Bold Italic.ttf
timesi.ttf Times New Roman Italic.ttf
trebuc.ttf Trebuchet MS.ttf
trebucbd.ttf Trebuchet MS Bold.ttf
trebucbi.ttf Trebuchet MS Bold Italic.ttf
trebucit.ttf Trebuchet MS Italic.ttf
verdana.ttf Verdana
verdanab.ttf Verdana Bold.ttf
verdanai.ttf Verdana Italic.ttf
verdanaz.ttf Verdana Bold Italic.ttf
webdings.ttf Webdings.ttf

  • Run texhash . in the TEXMFHOME directory.

  • Run updmap --enable MixedMap winfonts.map.

Now you should be ready to use the Windows fonts by including the winfonts package to your TeX source file and manually selecting the respective font, as described in the Winfonts documentation.

Note: There are other posts one the same topic, from which I drew inspiration. However, they turned out to be too specific to work for me, or add files to the global TeX tree. If my instructions don’t work for you, you might wanna take a look at them.

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1 Comment

  • Clemens says:
    25/08/2014 at 01:16

    If you’re going to use TTF fonts in a LaTeX document anyway, the best solution is probably to use LuaLaTeX, where you can use TTF fonts directly. No installation necessary, just put them into a “fonts” directory next to your tex sources and use the fontspec package to load them, e.g.:


    % set and load fonts
    \usepackage{fontspec}
    \setmainfont[
    Ligatures = TeX,
    ExternalLocation,
    Path = {./fonts/},
    Extension = {.otf},
    UprightFont = {*Regular},
    BoldFont = {*Bold},
    ItalicFont = {*Italic},
    BoldItalicFont = {*BoldItalic}]{Charter}
    \setsansfont[
    Ligatures = TeX,
    Scale = MatchLowercase,
    ExternalLocation,
    Path = {./fonts/},
    Extension = {.ttf},
    UprightFont = {*},
    BoldFont = {*-Bold},
    ItalicFont = {*-Oblique},
    BoldItalicFont = {*-BoldOblique}]{Helvetica}
    \setmonofont[
    Ligatures = TeX,
    Scale = MatchLowercase]{Latin Modern Mono}

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