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I'm writing a paper for university and my professor has some formal specification. We shall use Times New Roman, Arial or Tahoma as fonts. Clearly he thougth about Word when specifying this. So I searched for a fitting font in PDFLaTeX. As I want to write with serifs, I looked for one similar to Times New Roman and found newtx.

Now I want to know if this has the correct density (is this the correct term?), so if I can write as much characters as my colleagues using word and one of the mentioned fonts and not more. (Our limit is given in pages.)

My question: Has newtx a density similar to Times New Roman, Arial or Tahoma?

If there are any references for looking up such values, I'd like to learn this too.

There's a simple (and not necessarily correct) test you can do: Using the package typoaid you may look at values like the number of characters per width (tychperwidth) and maybe the values from the font table.

Compiling (as reference) the following document with Times New Roman:

documentclass[12pt]{article}

usepackage{fontspec}

setmainfont{Times New Roman}

usepackage{typoaid}

begin{document}

tychperwidth{rmfamily}par

tyfonttable{rmfamily}

end{document}

I get values like

On the other hand, with nimbusserif and pdflatex I get

documentclass[12pt]{article}

usepackage{nimbusserif}

usepackage{typoaid}

begin{document}

tychperwidth{rmfamily}par

tyfonttable{rmfamily}

end{document}

And finally with newtxtext and pdflatex:

documentclass[12pt]{article}

usepackage{newtxtext}

usepackage{typoaid}

begin{document}

tychperwidth{rmfamily}par

tyfonttable{rmfamily}

end{document}

That shows how you may get very similar result. Please note that you may get even better results than your colleagues by using proper hyphenation with babel and the enhancements offered by microtype.

You can use any of those three fonts with fontspec. If you have Cambria Math (including on a Windows partition you can symlink to), you can also use it, for the same font used in MS Office. For example:

usepackage{fontspec}

defaultfontfeatures{ Scale = MatchLowercase }

setmainfont{Times New Roman}[Scale = 1.0]

setsansfont{Arial}

setmonofont{Andale Mono}

In legacy PDFTeX, you can use the winfonts package in the T1 encoding.