[OS X TeX] MInion Pro - fullfamily problems

[Michael Sharpe]

On Apr 28, 2012, at 9:41 AM, Richard Seguin wrote:

> Michael,
> 
> I decided to complete the Minion Pro family by obtaining the medium weight, giving me all four weights, for use with LaTeX and Pages. I tested the new version of TeXFontUtility by uninstalling Minion Pro and reinstalling with all four weights. That went smoothly, and I got the correct encoding files this time.
> 
> I'm scratching my head again though, this time wondering how to access the medium weight in LaTeX. When I was using medfamily, I was using one of two techniques for accessing all of regular, semibold, and bold:
> 
> \renewcommand*{\bfdefault}{eb}  
> \def\semib#1{{\fontseries{sb}\selectfont #1}}
> 
> or 
> 
> \def\ebold#1{{\fontseries{eb}\selectfont #1}}
> 
> Now, if I try, for example,
> 
> \renewcommand*{\bfdefault}{eb}  
> \def\semib#1{{\fontseries{sb}\selectfont #1}}
> \def\medw#1{{\fontseries{m}\selectfont #1}}
> 
> \medw{ } has no effect, i.e., A and \medw{A} typeset at the same (regular) weight. (Interestingly, I can use any text string for the series, i.e. \def\medw#1{{\fontseries{xyz}\selectfont #1}}, and I get no error --- it still typesets at regular weight.)
> 
> Actually, I'm not even certain that \fontseries{m} even refers to the medium weight family.
> 
> Any ideas? Anyone?

As far as I can tell, the MinionPro support files contain virtual fonts for the Medium weight, but the fd files have no support for them. You can  extend them yourself on an as-needed basis by doing something like the following

\usepackage{article}
\usepackage{tracefnt}% so you can see what's being loaded
%SetFonts
% Minion Pro+MnSymbol
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[lf]{MinionPro}% MinionPro-LF is FontFamily used for text
% extend its .fd by adding mediumbold (mb) in two shapes
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{MinionPro-LF}{mb}{n}{
  <-> MinionPro-Medium-lf-t1
}{}
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{MinionPro-LF}{mb}{it}{
  <-> MinionPro-MediumIt-lf-t1
}{}
%
\def\medw#1{{\fontseries{mb}\selectfont #1}}
%SetFonts
\begin{document}

\medw{Abc}. \emph{Normal italic, \medw{a little bolder}}.

\end{document}  

Michael