Verdana font package

Synopsis

The package provides a T1-encoded wrapper for using the Verdana (sans-serif) font with PDFLaTeX. The TrueType files are not part of the package; if they are not provided with your operating system, you may download them (address in the documentation).

Not all distributions of the fonts offer the f-ligatures (fi, ff and fl) common in TeX-related fonts; the package has an option to avoid usage of such ligatures.

Package

The package is available on CTAN.

Background

‘Verdana’ is a common font that can be downloaded from: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/verdan32.exe?download

The font is readily available on machines with a Microsoft operating system. The wrapper provides a T1 encoded font. The wrapper would be most straightforward weren’t it for the ligature problems that Verdana exhibits. The core of the problem is that over the years, Microsoft removed several glyphs from the font, including the ligatures ‘fi’ and ‘fl’ (on the T1 octal positions 34 and 35). The font version 2006 (as it can be downloaded from sourceforge), still has the ligatures. In version 2008 they have been removed. In version 2010, even more glyphs have been removed. The reason for removing these glyphs is unclear to me.

To overcome these issues, the wrapper provides an option ‘nofligs’ (shorthand for ‘no f-ligatures’), that disables the invocation of these ligatures involving f.

Installation

Take a look at the package documentation on CTAN.

Usage

Take a look at the package documentation on CTAN.

License

The LaTeX Project Public License (lppl) 1.3 or later.

This software is copyright but you are granted a license which gives you, the “user” of the software, legal permission to copy, distribute, and/or modify the software. However, if you modify the software and then distribute it (even just locally) you must change the name of the software, or use other technical means to avoid confusion.