When creating figures for papers written in LaTeX, I have found it aesthetically unpleasing to have different fonts in the figures than in the text. Most figures I create in either OmniGraffle or Matlab, and here I have relied on regular OS X fonts.

Fortunately, I have discovered that it is possible to use LaTeX fonts in OS X. Apparently, this is now included as a feature in the latest version(s) of the MacTeX distribution (?), but I also discovered that it is possible to just download the fonts (as OTF files) and install them directly:

  1. Download the latest Computer Modern (Latex) Unicode fonts, the ones with *otf.tar.xz extension, from sourceforge

  2. Uncompress the archive

  3. Open the OS X application “Font Book”

  4. Drag all the OTF files onto the Font Book

The end result is that the fonts show up in all OS X applications. All the font names start with CMU, so it is easy to find them when opening the font dialogue in your application.

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