This is the README for the playfair package, version 2020-07-31.

This package provides the PlayFairDisplay family of fonts,
designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen

Playfair is a transitional design. From the time of enlightenment
in the late 18th century, the broad nib quills were replaced by
pointed steel pens. This influenced typographical letterforms to
become increasingly detached from the written ones. Developments
in printing technology, ink, and paper making, made it possible to
print letterforms of high contrast and delicate hairlines.

This design lends itself to this period, and while it is not a
revival of any particular design, it takes influence from the
designs of printer and typeface designer John Baskerville, the
punchcutter William Martin's typeface for the "Boydell Shakspeare"
edition, and from the "Scotch Roman" designs that followed
thereafter.

As the name indicates, Playfair Display is well suited for titling
and headlines. It has an extra large x-height and short descenders.
It can be set with no leading if space is tight, for instance in
news headlines, or for stylistic effect in titles. Capitals are
extra short, and only very slightly heavier than the lowercase
characters. This helps achieve a more even typographical colour when
typesetting proper nouns and initialisms. Languages, like German,
where nouns are capitalized, particularly benefit from this lower
contrast between lower and upper case glyphs. In German, with its
many capitalised words, and in other European languages that use
many diacritical characters, it is advised to use more leading.

To install this package on a TDS-compliant
TeX system download the file
"tex-archive"/install/fonts/playfair.tds.zip, where the
preferred URL for "tex-archive" is http://mirror.ctan.org.
Unzip the archive at the root of an appropriate texmf tree,
likely a personal or local tree. If necessary, update the
file-name database (e.g., texhash). Update the font-map
files by enabling the Map file PlayfairDisplay.map

To use, add

\usepackage{PlayfairDisplay}

to the preamble of your document. This will activate PlayfairDisplay
as the main (serifed) text font.

Option black chooses the black weight instead of the bold weight.

Options scaled=<number> or scale=<number> may be used to scale the
PlayfairDisplay fonts.

Other options are

oldstyle,osf    old-style figures
lining,lf       lining figures

The defaults are lining and proportional.

Commands \playfair and \playfairblack select the PlayfairDisplay and
PlayfairDisplay-Black families, respectively. Commands \playfairOsF,
\playfairLF and \sufigures are for localized use of non-default
figures.

The original fonts are available at
http://www.google.com/webfonts and are licensed under the
SIL Open Font License, (version 1.1); the text may be found
in the doc directory. The type1 fonts and support files were
generated by autoinst and are renamed in compliance with
the Reserved Font Name provision of the OFL licanse. The
rest of the package is licensed under the terms of the LaTeX
Project Public License. The maintainer of this package is
Bob Tennent (rdt at cs.queensu.ca)