[OS X TeX] XeLaTeX newbie questions

[Luis Sequeira]

Hi

Although I have been using (pdf)latex for many years, I am new to  
XeLaTeX.

I am co-writing a little brochure in mathematics for elementary  
school teachers (in Portuguese), and I wanted to produce the output  
straight from my LaTeX sources (rather than having someone totally  
unknowledgeable mangle all the content in Quark).

The editors have been sensitive to my plea, and are to give me the  
layout and font requirements, so that I can adjust my code.

I have been experimenting with XeLaTeX for that, because I thought it  
might make the use of the required fonts easier.

My first try was scaring: most characters with diacritical marks  
appeared wrong (such as the tilde in "ã" striking through the letter,  
and the "í" not appearing at all). Worse still, any LaTeX style  
markup, like \emph{...}, would produce only *red* garbage!

I finally *somewhat* got it to work, by modifying the xelatex  
engine,  to use "xelatex -no-pdf" to produce a xdv file, and then  
use  "xdvipfmx" (rather than, I believe, xdv2pdf) to produce the pdf.
I can now have readable output, but I am still confused, as it seems  
that these weird things ought not to happen (by the way, I tried both  
with texlive2007 and the latest gwtex); and I'm not sure how to match  
the text and math fonts in a systematic way.

I would be grateful for any recommendations - in particular, of good  
documentation, which I have been unable to find.

TIA

Luis Sequeira


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