[XeTeX] xetex, fontspec, windows problems

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi all,

I wrote Will Robertson a few days ago on the issue of fontspec not being 
able to load certain fonts in windows, which sparked a few responses, 
most notably by Akira Kakuto, who conjected it had to do with calling 
the font by filename rather than font name. I can assure you that this 
is however not the case. In fact the problem is so simple to demonstrate 
that it should be ridiculously easy to reproduce on any other windows box =)

Step 1: make sure you are in a modern Windows, like Windows XP, Windows 
Vista or Windows Server 2008 (which is essentially a stripped, leaner 
version of Vista)

Step 2: go to 
http://www.i-love-epson.co.jp/download2/printer/driver/win/page/ttf30.htm 
and download the ttf30.exe font package. These are free Japanese fonts 
offered by Epson, and have a particularly nice textbook font, referred 
to as "EPSON 教科書体Ｍ" in any font-aware text editor and word 
processor (running fc-list will verify this as being the font name).

Step 3: create the following very simple .tex file:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{EPSON 教科書体Ｍ}
\begin{document}
Test text: テストです（漢字も一緒）。
\end{document}

Step 4: run this file through xetex/xelatex

On my system (Windows Server 2008, using the MiKTeX distribution, 
running using xelatex) this goes horribly wrong, generating the 
following output:

------

This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.998.3 (MiKTeX 2.7)
entering extended mode
(test.tex
LaTeX2e <2005/12/01>
Babel <v3.8j> and hyphenation patterns for english, dumylang, 
nohyphenation, german, ngerman, french, loaded.
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\latex\base\article.cls"
Document Class: article 2005/09/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\latex\base\size10.clo"))
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\xelatex\fontspec\fontspec.sty"
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\generic\ifxetex\ifxetex.sty")
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\latex\tools\calc.sty")
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\latex\xkeyval\xkeyval.sty"
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\generic\xkeyval\xkeyval.tex"
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\generic\xkeyval\keyval.tex")))
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\latex\base\fontenc.sty"
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\xelatex\euenc\eu1enc.def")
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\xelatex\euenc\eu1lmr.fd"))
fontspec.cfg loaded.
("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\xelatex\fontspec\fontspec.cfg")) 
(test.aux)
[1] (test.aux) )
** ERROR ** Cannot proceed without the "native" font: EPSON-KYOKASHO 
(EPSON ã≥â»èëëÃÇl Regular)...

Output file removed.

Error 1 (driver return code) generating output;
file test.pdf may not be valid.
Transcript written on test.log.
------

The only thing I can think of here is that XeTeX is using the font name 
encoded in a wrong character encoding here...

Regards,

- Mike Kamermans
www.nihongoresources.com