[XeTeX] "Missing" system fonts

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Sun May 27 11:02:01 CEST 2007


On 26 May 2007, at 3:19 pm, John Smith wrote:

> OK, I have rebuilt all the fonts, changing the names so that there is
> no longer a collision between family name and font name -- so the
> Roman version of my Helvetica-lookalike is now called
> Helvetica_IndUni-Regular rather than Helvetica_IndUni (which is also
> the name of the family as a whole). The same goes for the
> Courier-lookalike.
>
> This has not solved my XeTeX problem: the Helvetica and Courier fonts
> still don't show up, while the rest (Times, Palatino, New Century
> Schoolbook) do. FontBook still puts dots next to the problematic
> fonts.
>
> The font menus that are offered by programs like TextEdit give a
> further clue: disastrously, they refer to the typefaces in question as
> just "Courier" and "Helvetica", whereas the menu entry names I have
> specified for use with them are "Helvetica Induni" and "Courier
> IndUni". Obviously these two are "colliding" somehow with the Mac
> system fonts, and no doubt this is the cause of all my problems, but I
> simply can't see why it is happening. Why does my Times IndUni not
> collide in the same way with the system font Times?

Sounds like there is still a naming conflict -- or is it possible you  
have an older version of your fonts installed somewhere, in a  
different location (~/Library/Fonts vs /Library/Fonts, or even a  
Classic "System Folder/Fonts"?).

One way to investigate the names would be to use ftxdumperfuser (from  
Apple's font tools package, see http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/ 
download/) to dump the 'name' table, and examine all the entries for  
(in)consistency.

JK



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