[XeTeX] Suddenly fonts are not found

[Jonathan Kew]

On 7 May 2008, at 2:58 pm, Jon Breitenbucher wrote:

> Hello all. I hope someone can give me an idea of what may be
> happening. I have documents that I typeset less than a month ago with
> XeTeX and yesterday when I opened the PDF output all the math
> characters are being shown with Helvetica as a substitute. They were
> fine when I viewed and printed them last month. Now when I typeset
> them I get things like
>
> *** font activation failed (status=0): lmsy8.pfb
>
> *** font lmsy8 (LMMathSymbols8-Italic: file 'lmsy8.pfb') not found
>
> sudo texhash does not fix it and the LM fonts are available to the
> system. Typesetting with just PDFLaTeX works fine. I'm stumped.  
> Thanks.


I'm not sure what's changed on your system so as to break things, but  
the simplest solution is probably to run xdvipdfmx instead of xdv2pdf  
as the output driver.

Those messages are coming from xdv2pdf when it's trying to use a .pfb  
font, which OS X doesn't support natively. To do this, it uses an  
auxiliary tool to "wrap" the .pfb in a pseudo-OpenType structure, and  
then asks OS X to activate that font. But apparently this is failing  
for you. Any recent system updates? Reinstallation of TeX stuff?

Anyhow, if you tell xetex to use xdvipdfmx, the problem should go  
away as that driver uses the pfb files directly. (It can do this  
because it doesn't rely on OS X font/graphics services.)

JK