Hi Kris,
You can indeed pick a custom font, but it's a little bit more
complicated than just pointing and clicking. And while it might be hard
to believe, this is by design.
LyX and LaTeX are designed as a "document processors" for the production
of professionally type set documents. As a result, they follow a lot of
typography conventions. (I'm hardly an expert on this subject. For a
much better introduction to the philosophy of LyX and LaTeX, I'd
recommend looking at the help documentation. Steve Litt has a good
article on his website that introduces some some of the conventions in
more detail.)
One of these conventions is the idea of uniformity and purpose. In a
typical typeset book, there are usually only a few fonts. There is a
body font (used in chapters, footnotes, endnotes and references), a
separate font for chapter and section headings, and maybe a third font
for other miscellaneous things. (I'm not talking about font variants
such as italics.) When you click on the font settings for LyX, you can
see this idea in practice. There is typically a "Roman" font, a
"Sans-Serif" font, and a typewriter font. These are called "font
families".
The actual font used for typesetting (like "Times New Roman", "Arial",
"Comic Sans", "Palatino" and others) are somewhat hidden. In fact, as
long as the writer is using the built-in document classes, she doesn't
need to worry about fonts at all. They are typically specified by the
document class. Since it is assumed that the document class was put
together by a typesetting specialist to specifically meet a particular
need, the amount of tinkering required is kept to a minimum. As an
example, I have a special template put together for NIH grant proposals.
(Whenever, I need to put a proposal together, I fire up LyX and start
typing. There aren't any worries about trying to get it "just right"
like there may be with Word templates.)
But like I said, you can change the font if you want. This is done in
the Document -> Settings -> Font. In the dialog, you'll see a couple of
choices. These include "Default Family", "Roman", "Sans Serif", and
"Typewriter". You can specify a different font for each family. If
there isn't an option that you like, you can also use a program called
Xelatex, to specify a font from your system. There is an introduction
on how to set up Xetex to work with LyX on the wiki:
http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/XeTeX.
After you follow the steps in the LyX wiki, then you can specify fonts
using the commands:
\setromanfont{Font Name}
\setmonofont{Font Name}
\setsansfont{Font Name}
You'll notice that even though you can change the font, you are still
encouraged to use "font families". This is actually a very good design,
not only does it increase the visual consistency of your document, but
it also lets you easily move from one document class to another. If you
should decide that "Comic-Sans" is a really ghastly font, you can easily
change it to something else without having to carefully scour your
document.
Through xetex, you can use any font installed on your computer. Just
remember to create the PDF using xelatex instead of latex of pdflatex,
or it will fail with errors.
Cheers,
Rob Oakes
On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 20:23 -0800, Ash Lereth wrote:
> Is there any way in Lyx to use a font that my OS has? I have windows
> vista and just downloaded a bunch of .ttf fonts and want to use them.
> I should be able to pick my font right? All I see is
> roman/serif/typewriter...I want to pick the font name, where can I do
> that?
>
> Thanks for your help.
> Kris
