[OS X TeX] Book Design Resources

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 27 nov. 06 à 14:35, David Oliver a écrit :

> Lastly, there have been a number of documents describing the  
> installation of new fonts in LaTeX, a process that is less simple  
> than one might hope, and some of these go pack some years. What is  
> the most up to date document describing installation of new fonts?

The most flexible way of using fonts in TeX on the Mac is XeTeX  
<http://scripts.sil.org/xetex>. It can use whichever font is known to  
OS X, with the fontspec package making it easier in LaTeX; see <ftp:// 
tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/macros/xetex/latex/fontspec/fontspec.pdf>.

There are two problems, though, at present with XeTeX:

(1) Many LaTeX packages don't play nice with it: XeTeX represents a  
new DVI-to-PDF driver, compared with the ubiquitous dvips and pdfTeX,  
and many LaTeX packages include driver definition files for only  
dvips or pdfTeX (or, even worse, include hardwired switches for dvips  
and pdfTeX).

Of course, the above is an oversimplification: XeTeX uses an  
extension of the DVI format called XDV, and it can be configured to  
use either of two XDV-to-PDF converters: the default converter  
xdv2pdf, which is MacOS-specific and can use all the font formats  
known to OS X and all the graphic formats known to QuickTime  
(including TIFF, which pdfTeX cannot handle); the alternative  
converter xdvipdfmx, which is cross-platform but can handle less font  
formats and less graphic formats. XeTeX itself is now cross-platform,  
having started on the Mac.

(2) XeTeX cannot deal with virtual fonts. This means in practice that  
for maths you're limited to Computer Modern, with the above niceties  
being available for text only. That is likely to change in the  
future, especially when the STIX fonts will be released. (And I am  
myself using happily the Lucida fonts for maths in XeTeX.)

All this is evolving rapidly, as XeTeX is getting wider exposure in  
the TeX community. (For example, it will be included in TeXLive 2006,  
and the pdfTeX and XeTeX developers know each other and speak to each  
other.)

Apart from that, there's the tutorial <http://tug.org/mactex/fonts/ 
fonttutorial-current.html>. Beware that it's largely outdated (though  
the adaptations should be straightforward enough to figure out).

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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