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Choice of scalable outline fonts

If you are interested in text alone, you can use any of over 20,000 fonts(!) in Adobe Type 1 format (called `PostScript fonts' in the TeX world and `ATM fonts' in the DTP world), or any of several hundred fonts in TrueType format. That is, provided of course, that your previewer and printer driver support scalable outline fonts.

TeX itself only cares about metrics, not the actual character programs. You just need to create a TeX metric file TFM using some tool such as afm2tfm, afmtotfm (from Y&Y, see commercial implementations) or fontinst. For the previewer or printer driver you need the actual outline font files themselves (pfa for Display PostScript, pfb for ATM on IBM PC, Mac outline font files on Macintosh).

If you also need mathematics, then you are severely limited by the demands that TeX makes of maths fonts (for details, see the paper by B.K.P. Horn in TUGboat 14(3)). For maths, then, there are relatively few choices:

Computer Modern
(75 fonts - optical scaling) Donald E. Knuth
Note that CM is available in scalable outline form. There are commercial as well as public domain versions, and there are both Adobe Type 1 and TrueType versions. Some of these are `commercial grade,' with full hand-tuned hinting, some render very poorly, while others are merely incompatible with Adobe Type Manager (ATM).
Lucida Bright with Lucida New Math
(25 fonts) Chuck Bigelow and Kris Holmes
Lucida is a family of related fonts including seriffed, sans serif, sans serif fixed width, calligraphic, blackletter, fax, Kris Holmes' connected handwriting font, etc; they're not as `spindly' as Computer Modern, with a large x-height, and include a larger set of maths symbols, operators, relations and delimiters than CM (over 800 instead of 384: among others, it also includes the AMS msam and msbm symbol sets). The planned `Lucida Bright Expert' (14 fonts) adds seriffed fixed width, another handwriting font, smallcaps, bold maths, upright `maths italic', etc., to the set The distribution includes support for use with plain TeX and LaTeX 2.09. Support under LaTeX2e is provided in PSNFSS thanks to Sebastian Rahtz.
MathTime 1.1
(3 fonts) TeXplorators (Michael Spivak)
The set contains maths italic, symbol, and extension fonts, designed to work well with Times-Roman. These are typically used with Times, Helvetica and Courier (which are resident on many printers, and which are supplied with some PC versions). In addition you may want to complement this basic set with Adobe's Times Smallcap, and perhaps the set of Adobe `Math Pi' fonts, which include blackboard bold, blackletter, and script faces. The distribution includes support for use with plain TeX and LaTeX 2.09 (including code to link in Adobe Math Pi 2 and Math Pi 6). Support under LaTeX2e is provided in PSNFSS thanks to Sebastian Rahtz.
Adobe Lucida, LucidaSans and LucidaMath
(12 fonts)
Lucida and LucidaMath are generally considered to be a bit heavy. The three maths fonts contain only the glyphs in the CM maths italic, symbol, and extension fonts. Support for using LucidaMath with TeX is not very good; you will need to do some work reencoding fonts etc. (In some sense this set is the ancestor of the LucidaBright plus LucidaNewMath font set.)
Concrete, the AMS maths fonts etc.
Donald E. Knuth and the AMS.
These are sometimes mentioned as alternatives to CM, but they are really adjuncts, in that you need to use at least the basic CM maths fonts with them.
Proprietary fonts
Various sources.
Since having a high quality font set in scalable outline form that works with TeX can give a publisher a real competitive advantage, there are some publishers that have paid (a lot) to have such font sets made for them. Unfortunately, these sets are not available on the open market, despite the likelihood that they're more complete than those that are.
Mathptm
(4 fonts) Alan Jeffrey.
This set contains maths italic, symbol, extension, and roman virtual fonts, built from Adobe Times, Symbol, Zapf Chancery, and the Computer Modern fonts. The Mathptm fonts are free, and the resulting PostScript files can be freely exchanged. Contains most of the CM math symbols. Support under LaTeX2e in PSNFSS thanks to Alan Jeffrey and Sebastian Rahtz.

(A similar development by Thomas Esser, using the Adobe Palatino fonts, is available from systems/unix/teTeX/updates/texmf/mathppl.sh)

All of the first three font sets are available in formats suitable for IBM PC/Windows, Macintosh and Unix/NeXT from Y&Y and from Blue Sky Research (see commercial suppliers for details). The MathTime fonts are also available from:

TeXplorators
1572 West Gray #377
Houston TX 77019
USA
The very limited selection of maths font sets is a direct result of the fact that a maths font has to be explicitly designed for use with TeX and as a result it is likely to lose some of its appeal in other markets. Furthermore, the TeX market for commercial fonts is minute (in comparison, for example, to Microsoft TrueType font pack #1, which sold something like 10 million copies in a few weeks after release of Windows 3.1!).

Text fonts in Type 1 format are available from many vendors including Adobe, Monotype, Bitstream. Avoid cheap rip-offs: not only are you rewarding unethical behaviour, destroying the cottage industry of innovative type design, but you are also very likely to get junk. The fonts may not render well (or at all under ATM), may not have the `standard' complement of 228 glyphs, or may not include metric files (needed to make TFM files). Also, avoid TrueType fonts from all but the major vendors. TrueType fonts are an order of magnitude harder to `hint' properly than Type 1 fonts and hence TrueType fonts from places other than Microsoft and Apple may be suspect. In any case you may find other problems with TrueType fonts such as service bureaux not accepting jobs calling for them.

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