Using the font "Foundry Form Sans Book" in LaTeX

When I first tried to use our corporate font, Foundry Form Sans Book, in LaTeX, I didn't have much success. — But now it works.

The basic problem seems to have been that our IT department only distributes the font as .pfb and .pfm files, while LaTeX has a preference for the combination of .pfb and .afm files.

Part one in the solution was to contact Foundry Types Ltd and order a one workstation license of the font in PC PostScript format. They charged my corporate credit card 60 GBP and sent me a zip file containing .pfb and .afm files for the font.

Part two in the solution was to read Tutorial I in Philipp Lehman's The Font Installation Guide, and convert the instructions there (combined with a bit of advice from dk.edb.tekst) to a Unix script: ffs-install

When you have unzipped the file from Foundry Types Ltd, and downloaded ffs-install to the same directory, you just need to execute these two commands to make Foundry Form Sans Book available from LaTeX:

chmod +x ffs-install
./ffs-install

You will probably be asked for your password by sudo at some point in the process. This is for copying the files to the proper location for LaTeX to find them. If you haven't got sudo access, you should ask your system administrator to run ffs-install for you.