The MathTime fonts are fonts of math symbols which are designed to be used together with the standard PostScript Times font family (which you get e.g. by loading the package times). When you typeset a document with MathTime, in math mode Times will be used for letters and numbers (with Helvetica for sans-serif and Courier for typewriter) while MathTime will be used for greek letters and math symbols. This should make equations "look right" when the main text is set with the standard PostScript fonts.
The MathTime fonts are not part of standard LaTeX but have to be acquired separately (bought). The department of Basic Sciences and Environment has bought MathTime for LaTeX installations.
Why use MathTime?
You should use MathTime for any document set with the standard PostScript fonts (which you typically do with \usepackage{times}). There can be several reasons to use the PostScript fonts:
- If you want to generate a PDF file which is as compact as possible (because fewer fonts need to be embedded) and in which no fonts are rasterized.
- If you have many plots or figures (e.g. generated in .eps format) which uses PostScript fonts for labels and numbers.
- If you think the PostScript fonts look nicer than the deault TeX fonts (computer modern). Times is somewhat narrower than Computer Modern and has thicker lines. This makes for more text on each line and increased on-screen readability - and it looks better on presentation slides (at least in my opinion).
If you use only the times package you get the main text in PostScript fonts while math text is set with Computer Modern. Here is a small example of some text with math, written in LaTeX like this:
\ldots the sum
$\sum_{i=1}^{n} \alpha_i x_i$, where $x_i \in \mathcal{X}$,
is computed \ldots
(The images below were created at 216 dpi, with 10 pt fonts.)
With default LaTeX fonts, the text looks like this:
With times alone it looks like this:
With times and mathtime it looks like this:
How to use the MathTime fonts
Assuming you have the MathTime font files installed, there are two packages to choose from in order to enable them. The "official" package is called mathtime and gives you (with the proper options) access to all the MathTime fonts. The "alternate" package mt11p (by Drahoslav Lím) also gives you the MathTime fonts and furthermore a few extra commands and easy access to some variant symbols and upright greek letters. It may also co-exist better (than mathtime) with certain AMS packages, if you use those. The main "problem" with mt11p is that it generates a lot of warnings when you run latex on a document using it - but the output seems OK though (in my limited experience at least).
Unfortunately the two packages cannot co-exist as they provide different font metric files with identical file names. You must therefore choose which package to install. Take a look at the documentation for mt11p and for mathtime to decide which one you want (ignore anything these documents say about installation).
Installation
For installation of the MathTime fonts themselves, which are not publicly available (and thus not downloadable from here), you need to contact me (Morten Larsen) to get either mathtime-fonts.tgz or mathtime-fonts.zip (of course only if you work at IGM). You then need to download the support files for the package you select to install.
Then proceed with the instructions for either mathtime or mt11p.
If you do not work at IGM
If you do not work at IGM (the Department of Basic Sciences and Environment at KU-LIFE) you are not covered by our original license and you will not be able to get the mathtime-fonts.* files from me. You can instead take a look at the comercially available successor to the MathTime fonts, MTPro2, available from pctex.com.