sansforgetica

LaTeX support for the Sans Forgetica typeface, with particular emphasis on pdfLaTeX.

Version 0.1.0 (2026-09-20).

!IMPORTANT
The CTAN upload archive is intentionally font-free. It contains neither the
Sans Forgetica OTF nor converted font files, metrics, or a font map. A user
must obtain the font separately and prepare a local TeX font installation.

CTAN archive contents

sansforgetica-ctan.zip has one top-level sansforgetica/ directory:

sansforgetica/
├── README.md
├── LICENSE
├── doc/
│   ├── sansforgetica.pdf
│   ├── sansforgetica.tex
│   ├── font-sample-sansforgetica.pdf
│   ├── font-sample-sansforgetica.tex
│   └── outline-font-sample-sansforgetica.sh
└── tex/
    ├── sansforgetica.sty
    └── t1sforgetica.fd

The manual contains the installation, interface, provenance, and licensing details. Its LaTeX source is included beside the PDF. The uniquely named font sample lists A–Z and a–z in every declared style, plus German and accented Latin characters. In the distributed sample PDF, Inkscape has converted every text object to a vector path; pdffonts therefore reports no fonts. Its LaTeX source and the uniquely named outlining script are included beside it.

Build the upload ZIP

The manual is deliberately typeset with Latin Modern. Building the vector sample requires a locally obtained Sans Forgetica OTF, LCDF Typetools, Inkscape, Ghostscript, Perl, Poppler tools, and a TeX distribution containing ec.enc. Build the reproducible upload archive with:

make ctan

The result is dist/sansforgetica-ctan.zip.

Local font build and tests

For development, place a legally obtained original font at vendor/SansForgetica-Regular.otf. Install LCDF Typetools and a TeX distribution containing ec.enc, then run:

make fonts
make test
make sample

The build verifies the OTF checksum before producing a local Type 1 font, T1 metrics, and map below build/. The first sample PDF is a private working file. Inkscape then converts every page to vector paths. Ghostscript and the outlining script normalize the PDF timestamp and document identifier so repeat builds are byte-for-byte identical. Finally, the build verifies that the distributable sample PDF contains no fonts. The OTF, generated font assets, and private working PDF are excluded from the CTAN ZIP.

The package interface is:

\usepackage{sansforgetica}

{\sansforgetica Text set in Sans Forgetica.}

Use \usepackage[default]{sansforgetica} to request Sans Forgetica as the document's default family. The historical release contains Regular only; all other declared styles substitute Regular.

Licensing and provenance

The independently written package support, documentation, sample source, editorial layout, tests, and build scripts are licensed under LPPL 1.3c or later. See LICENSE.

Sans Forgetica is a separate work. No original or converted font program is included in the CTAN ZIP. The sample PDF contains vector representations of glyph forms; outlining removes the embedded font program but does not change the font licence. A published Figure 1 caption identifies Sans Forgetica as CC BY-NC 3.0 and gives that licence's URI, with an access date of 15 November 2018. The caption and its associated full-text study are available on ResearchGate: Lucy Cui and Jereth Liu, “Recognition of Studied Words in Perceptual Disfluent Sans Forgetica Font,” Vision 6(3), 2022, article 52, DOI 10.3390/vision6030052.

Further evidence and the distinction between the article licence and font licence are recorded in the included PDF manual.

Contact

Maintainer and technical contact: <erik@ctan.org>.

The initial implementation was developed with assistance from OpenAI ChatGPT; the maintainer remains responsible for review, licensing, releases, and maintenance.