[OS X TeX] Non OS X fonts with XeTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 22 Oct 2005, at 6:09 pm, Œistein Andersen wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I get the following error message when I try to use a non OS X font  
> with XeLaTeX:
>
>
>> exception: SimplePSInterpreterException  reason: condition in if  
>> is not a boolean
>>
>> *** font activation failed (status=0): fcc10.pfb
>>
>> *** font fcc10 (fcc10: file 'fcc10.pfb') not found
>>
>> *** font fcc10 (fcc10.pfb) not found, will substitute Helvetica  
>> glyphs
>>
>
> The file fcc10.pfb is located in ~/Library/texmf/fonts/type1/, and  
> the font indeed works correctly with pdfLaTeX. Is some special  
> installation necessary? (I.e. is an updmap not enough?)

No, what this indicates is that the utility T1Wrap, which  
repackages .pfb fonts into a form that CoreGraphics can use, is  
unable to interpret the font.

Sorry, there's currently no good workaround for this. The tool has to  
decrypt and interpret the PostScript font in order to repackage it;  
but it doesn't have a real PostScript interpreter, only a crude  
pseudo-interpreter that I hacked up in a couple of evenings of Perl- 
ing (and Massimiliano then converted to Objective-C for speed). We  
tried this tool on all the .pfbs in a normal gwTeX distribution, and  
*almost* all of them can be converted successfully, but there are a  
handful that fail, with errors like this.

One thing that *might* work, if you care to try, would be to load the  
font into FontForge (or FontLab, if you happen to have it) and  
regenerate a fresh .pfb file, as the problem may be related to the  
particular PostScript code that a certain tool wrote. Regenerating  
the font might use different PostScript language constructs, and  
avoid the problem.

(Where does this font come from, by the way? I don't seem to have it  
on my system.)

JK

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