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pdfTeX does not use your system fonts. It will not even load TrueType or OpenType fonts, but usually uses Type 1 fonts. Fonts for LaTeX come bundled with your TeX distribution like TeX live (on my Arch system present in /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/).

If you want to use system fonts you should have a look at Lua(La)TeX (or Xe(La)TeX but I think focus shifted completely to the LuaTeX engine).

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> If you want to use system fonts you should have a look at Lua(La)TeX (or Xe(La)TeX but I think focus shifted completely to the LuaTeX engine).

Luatex seems the more promising technology from the point of view of continued evolution of the Tex ecosystem, but there's been talk of Luatex being the successor to Pdftex for over ten years and it was held up by the fact that Luatex is not superconservative in the way it changes Tex layout and is less so than Xetex.

I've not really followed the discussion about succession to pdftex in Texlive in recent years, but it'd definitely be a change to their risk-averse ways if they did simply change 'latex' to mean 'lualatex'.

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