I'm new to LaTeX and it's a breeze to get it to work provided you stick
with the defaults.  They are fine with me except that my printouts use
a font that looks like I tore a page out of one of the O'Reilly books.

Quite striking but I found such high-quality fonts inappropriate for
correspondence.  Makes the end result look a little "arrogant", which
is not what I want in this particular case.

I tried specifying a different font family such as Garamond, Helvet and
a couple of others but I didn't see any difference either when viewing
the compiled document in xdvi or when printed - HP LJ2100M, native
postscript. I'm obviously not doing it right.

Could any one point me to the relevant manual - or provide a brief
explanation?

Thanks.

cga