MS Comic Sans

If you for some reason want to use MS Comic Sans with LaTeX on your Mac (I sometimes use it on presentations created with Beamer), you can use the following steps (see the comicsans package documentation for more information):

• Install the following software: cabextract (use Fink) and FontForge (use i-Installer, FontForge used to be called pfaedit).
• Download and install the comicsans package. The easiest way to do this is to get the comicsans texmf dictionary tree (tgz or zip) and unpack it over your local texmf directory tree. You should not overwrite existing files. If your local texmf directory tree is ~/Library/texmf, do the following ($ is the prompt):

  $ cd ~/Library
  $ ftp http://www.tug.org/cgi-bin/dirarchive/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/comicsans/texmf.tgz
  $ tar xzvkf texmf.tgz
  

• Get the MS Comic Sans font files. You should search for the file comic32.exe (don't worry, we will never run this as a program).
• Unpack the font files from the comic32.exe cabinet using the cabextract program.
• Copy the ttf files to the texmf/fonts/truetype/microsoft/comicsans/ directory. The files should be renamed comic.ttf (the regular font) and comicbd.ttf (the bold font).
• Convert the ttf files to Type 1 using FontForge: Open comic.ttf in FontForge, Select "Font Info..." from the "Element" menu, click on the "Encoding" tab and select "TeX (8r)" for the encoding. Click "OK". Select "Generate Fonts..." from the "File" menu. Save the new font as rcomic8r.pfb in the texmf/fonts/type1/microsoft/comicsans/ directory. Repeat this for the comicbd.tff file generating the rcomicbd8r.pfb file.
• Update mapping from TeX font names to TTF font names (see comicsans.map). In a teTeX distribution this is done with the updmap command:

  $ sudo updmap --enable Map comicsans.map
  

October 3 2005 (aa)