Using a custom TrueType font in spans of text

Using a custom TrueType font in spans of text

I am putting together a book using pdfTeX (from the TeX Live distribution
on OSX), and part of the book involves a fictional dictionary for a
constructed language. What I would like to do is define a command called,
say, \conlang which switches to what is essentially a symbol font for the
duration of that command. The .ttf also needs to be embedded in the .pdf.
I have found a number of tutorials on how to change the font family for
the entire book, and I have found tutorials on how to change the font when
using a package-specified font, but nothing for how to build the commands
that actually load the fontfamily and make it available without building
an entire package.