[OS X TeX] Re: using xeTex

[Herbert Schulz]

On Feb 5, 2007, at 11:59 AM, Manuel Souto Pico wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've read in list's archive (in a conversation which ends here:
> http://www.tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/2005-October/ 
> 018342.html)
> that the best option to use Chinese characters in a latex document is
> to use xeTeX.
>
> I've got some doubts about this:
>
> 1) How do I know whether it's installed?
>
> I think I installed MacTex, but I can't remember either and don't know
> how to find out what I installed exactly.
>
> 2) Should I change my latex syntax (eg. the preamble)?
>
> The reason for the second question is that I've configured TeXShop to
> use xeTex as indicated  here
> (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php? 
> site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex_texshop)
> but I can't compile a document which compiled well with latex. See
> error message:
>
> !Undefined control sequence.
> l.1 \documentclass
> [a4paper,10pt,oneside]{book}
>
> So it either means that the package(package?) is not installed or that
> my syntax is not correct.
>
> Thanks a lot for your help.
> Manuel

Howdy,

Are you compiling using xelatex? It appears that the latex macros are  
not understood.

If you could provide a minimal example that displays the problem and  
the output of the log file that would go along way for us to  
understand what is happening.

Finally, is there a xelatex.engine file in the ~/Library/TeXShop/ 
Engines/ directory (~ is your home directory). If so, the  
instructions at that page are a bit out of date. You can get the same  
effect by placing the line

%!TEX TS-program = xelatex

as the first line of your document. Then simply typesetting (Cmd-T)  
would run xelatex on the file. To guarantee that the file is saved as  
UTF-8 ass the line

%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode

as the second line in the document.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)



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