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The PreTeXt Guide

Section 40.1 Processing with pdflatex

Fonts used by come in encodings. The original encoding is known as OT1 and organizes glyphs (shapes of individual characters) 128 at a time. Since this puts regular Latin letters in one group, and accented letters into another group, this makes automatic hyphenation impossible if accented letters are used (as in many European countries and much of the Americas). The 1990 Users Group (TUG) meeting in Cork, Ireland, formulated new and improved encodings. The T1 encoding is one result, and so it is known as the Cork encoding (and also as EC). It groups 256 glyphs together at a time. So you need only know that a T1 encoding is better than an OT1 encoding. If you want to know more (much more), locate font encodings” by Mittlebach, Fairbairns, & Lemberg.
The Font Catalogue
 1 
www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/
is a great resource for locating different fonts. The fonts and their packages are likely already installed (this information is provided), or there is enough information about how to install the package in a standard way. Each gives exact directions on how to enable the font for a document. For example, Iwona
 2 
www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/iwona/
, a sans-serif font with support for mathematics, can be employed as the document font simply by including the following in the preamble:
\usepackage[math]{iwona}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
This suggested use of fontenc package (not to be confused with the fontspec package) indicates the availability of a T1 encoding.
Note: when the Font Catalogue says “OTF or TTF available” then the font can also be used with xelatex. When it says “OTF or TTF only” then the font cannot be used via pdflatex. Read on.