A list of commonly used commands in LaTeX to change the appearance of text in your document.
This website provides an overview of basic text formatting commands in LaTeX. Most commands are very straightforward to use. I personally think there will be few usecases to manually adjust the settings of the font, because the environments usually do this job for you automatically, I just included this for completeness.
Font Size
The following commands allow you to change the font size in LaTeX. The commands work relative to the default document font size.
| Name | Symbol | Command |
|---|---|---|
| Tiny | \({\tiny Text}\) | {\tiny Text} |
| Small | \({\small Text}\) | {\small Text} |
| Normal | \({\normalsize Text}\) | {\normalsize Text} |
| Large | \({\large Text}\) | {\large Text} |
| Huge | \({\huge Text}\) | {\huge Text} |
Font Style
These commands enable you to change the font itself to different styles. Note that there are two ways to obtain italic text, where \emph should be preferred over \textit since it’s the command to emphasize text in general. The underline command doesn’t really change your font, but it’s sometimes used to highlight text anyway. Those commands enable you to use Bold, Italic, Underline, Typewriter fonts and much more in LaTeX.
| Name | Symbol | Command |
|---|---|---|
| Bold | \(\textbf{Text}\) | \textbf{Text} |
| Italic | \(\textit{Text}\) | \textit{Text} |
| Typewriter | \(\texttt{Text}\) | \texttt{Text} |
| Sans-Serif | \(\textsf{Text}\) | \ltextsf{Text} |
| Serif (Roman) | \(\textrm{Text}\) | \textrm{Text} |
| Underline | \(\underline{Text}\) | \underline{Text} |