[OS X TeX] Getting started with LuaLaTeX, CCF fonts, ednotes

[Alan Munn]

On Jun 28, 2012, at 12:42 PM, Paul Dulaney wrote:

> I’m returning to the LaTeX world after a hiatus of about 5 years. LuaLaTeX looks intriguing, so I’ve decided to go down that path – but there have been a few bumps in the road. I would appreciate any responses to the following:
> 
>  
> 1. LuaLaTeX is supposed to be able to use the regular fonts on my Mac, but it chokes on some of them. I came across the following: "Note however that Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
>  contains a bug with its .ttc fonts, so none of these types of fonts can be  loaded through LuaTeX. (E.g., system-distributed Cochin, Hoefler Text, Optima,  etc.) This is a shame but there's nothing we can do about it" (Will Robertson  at www.tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2010-May/025965.html). So I upgraded to 10.7 over the weekend, but no joy. (I also upgraded to texlive 2011.) There was also a post by Khaled Hosny (~Sept 2011) saying that the .ttc files were being removed from the blacklist file. To anyone’s knowledge has the handling of .ttc fonts been corrected in 10.7?

I think the issue has been resolved in the development version of luaotfload but not in the distributed code, I think.  As far as I know, even on Snow Leopard, the fonts now work, and the problem is that they are still blacklisted.

I don't know if the changed version will be part of the soon to be released TeX Live 2012.

As a solution, you will need to edit 

/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/tex/luatex/luaotfload/otfl-blacklist.cnf

And comment out all of the font list with a % sign

You'll need to do this with an editor like TextWrangler or BBEdit that allows you to authenticate to save documents (i.e. you can't do this in TeXShop) or use the terminal and start an editor using sudo.

Unlike some other .cnf files, this is not set up so that a local version of the file will take precedence, so you do need to edit this file.

After you've done this, you'll need to remove the cached information that luatex stores in your home library.  So you will need to remove:

~/Library/texlive/2011/texmf-var/luatex-cache

The next time you run LuaTeX it will take a while to rebuild the cached information.

I haven't tested with all the fonts, but a quick test reveals that this works in Snow Leopard, so I assume it will also work in Lion.

> 
>  
> 2. Is it possible in LuaLaTeX to specify specific font sizes? I couldn’t see how to do this in the documentation.

This is just standard LaTeX: \fontsize{<size>}{<leading>}\selectfont


> 
>  
> 3. Because my current project is an annotated/critical edition of a 17th century Puritan writer, I’m interested in using ednotes. Has anyone used this with LuaLaTeX?

No specific comment on this, but in my experience, there are very few real incompatibilities between standard LaTeX packages and LuaTeX.  There are some XeTeX specific packages that don't work with LuaTeX, but more generic packages generally work.

> 
>  
> 4. A very specialized question with respect to ednotes (or the underlying lineno package): I know that it is easy to get line numbering on every line or every kth line, but what I would like is for line numbers to show up in the margin only when there is something on that line for which I would like to provide a note. The line number would then both indicate the line number and would also provide an unobtrusive indication – more subtle than a footnote marker – that there is some textual comment with respect to this line.

I would ask this as a separate question, preferably with a complete minimal example of what you are doing and what you would want it to look like

It would also be best to ask this question  on the texhax mailing list http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/texhax/ (if you like mailing lists) rather than here which is really for OS X specific issues rather than general LaTeX questions. 

Some other non-mailing list alternatives:

or on http://tex.stackexchange.com if you prefer not to get tons of mail

or on the newsgroup comp.text.tex if you're really old school. :)


Alan


-- 
Alan Munn
amunn at gmx.com