[XeTeX] unable to find TFM file cmr10

[Jonathan Kew]

On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:55:26 -0400
 Paul Tremblay <phthenry at iglou.com> wrote:
> I thought my xelatex was set up properly, but I just realized that 
> unless I specify a font, xelatex will not produce a PDF file. It will 
> remove the PDF file and when run in debug mode give this error message:
> 
> unable to find TFM file cmr10


This sounds like the xdvipdfmx driver is not finding your standard texmf tree. I'm guessing the most likely cause is that the xdvipdfmx binary is not installed in the right place relative to the rest of the tex installation, and in particular the texmf.cnf configuration file.

You didn't mention what kind of system you're on, or how TeX and XeTeX were installed; is it possible that you've ended up with a self-compiled xdvipdfmx somewhere like /usr/bin or even ~/bin, but the main TeX installation is in a separate tree such as /usr/local/texlive or something? Did you install with a package manager of some kind, or build from source?

In general, you need to have the binaries (xetex/xelatex/xdvipdfmx) in the same bin directory as other TeX-related programs, so they'll find and share the same configuration; anything else is asking for inconsistency and trouble. Use 'which' to check where things are, and look out for symlinks that might mislead you as to the location of the actual executables.

JK