[OS X TeX] comprehensive font families and abbreviation?

[Duke]

On 12/28/08 6:15 PM, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> The so-called abbreviations are the stems of the TeX font names. Karl 
> Berry found a reasonable scheme to map PostScript font names to TeX 
> font names. On the command line do
>
>     texdoc fontname
>
> This will give you 331 pages.
>
> Another option is to look up your TeX engine's MAP file. PdfTeX uses 
> pdftex.map, dvips uses psfonts.map, and dvipdfm uses dvipdfm.map. On 
> the command line you could invoke:
>
>     grep -i <some font name particle> `kpsewhich <your MAP file>`
>
> The text from < to > has to be substituted with your choice. By using 
> 'grep -i' the case plays no role. The 'font name particle' can be part 
> of a PostScript font name (for example helve) or the TeX font name 
> (for example phv). This *will* fail for Computer Modern (CM) fonts. In 
> LaTeX you do not necessarily need to use their name because you can 
> use commands like \textrm, \em, or textsf, etc. The same is also true 
> when you substitute the CM fonts with their updated form "Latin Modern."
By googling or tex document sites, or even documents in my system, I can 
also get those information, such as font family and its abbreviation, 
but not its sample. How can I use the font (with the fancy name) but I 
have no idea how it looks?
>
> For many PostScript fonts packages are built. A \usepackage{times} in 
> the preamble sets Times for the roman or serif face, Helvetica for 
> sans-serif, and Courier for typewriter (monospaced).
>
> Sometimes it works to invoke 'texdoc <package name or something 
> related to the PostScript font's name>' to get the documentation. 
> Again, for the "standard PostScript fonts" it will fail, 'texdoc 
> psfonts' or better 'texdoc psnfss2e' will do.
>
>>
>> 2. How do I know the font I want to use is already installed in my 
>> system and that I can use it?
>>
>> FYI, I use 10.5.6 with MacTex 2008 (full package).
>
>
> Three options:
>
>  1.) tlmgr search [possible option −−file or −−global] <something>
>  2.) kpsewhich [possible restrictions] <something exactly TeXy>
>  3.) Spotlight
>
Yeah, thanks for these suggestions. I do know them but thought of 
something more convenience. For example, long time ago I used MikTeX 
with WinEdt, I recall that using WinEdt I can see the list of all 
installed fonts for TeX, and hope that there would be some similar thing 
with TeXShop and MacTeX. If there is a list like that together with 
samples like the one in Photoshop, that would be excellent!

D.