[tex-live] Unicode font support

[Timothy Legg]

I have tried all these and they are very confusing.  I have don't consider myself a LaTeX developer nor an expert in typesetting or fonts and it would take at least a year for me to get to that point.

I transcribed a 150 year old book into UNICODE and I don't want to generate the PDFs using OpenOffice anymore because it was way too time consuming considering the document is being actively proofread and needing to be reproduced every week or so.

I seemed to be able to copy the steps on the radamir.com site, but that is oriented for the windows version of LaTeX.  At this point, I guess I am willing to install windows on an old hard disk to use this font with LaTeX.  As far as the texdoc files, I was lost from the very beginning of those two documents.  The sil.org link seems to go to the front page of some competing project (was there a typo in the address?).

Is there any document that will tell me what to type in order to accomplish what I need without being an expert in the internals of what composes font files or LaTeX stuff.  I only need to do this once and I just want it to work...  It is just a TTF file and I thought they were standard...

Thanks, Tim

--- On Sat, 5/2/09, Axel E. Retif <axel.retif at mac.com> wrote:

> From: Axel E. Retif <axel.retif at mac.com>
> Subject: Re: [tex-live] Unicode font support
> To: "Timothy Legg" <tim_legg_iowa at yahoo.com>
> Cc: tex-live at tug.org
> Date: Saturday, May 2, 2009, 6:38 PM
> On  2 May, 2009, at 16:08, Timothy Legg wrote:
> 
> > Thanks to all whom helped me produce my first DVI file
> since I left college years ago!
> > 
> > I just have a minor issue.  I am trying to produce a
> document that is not in English and, other than punctuation,
> has no Latin characters.  Need I mention, the document was a
> few hundred pages shorter than I had expected.
> > 
> > I have a TTF file that has the characters I want to
> have.
> > 
> > I found some directories with TTF files in them,
> > 
> > for example:
> > ./2008/texmf-dist/doc/fonts/fonetika/
> 
> [...]
> 
> As Zdenek said, you should use texmf-local...
> 
> > So I can copy the file into one of these directories,
> but how would I ensure that it will find/use it?
> 
> Ah! Here is the problem! It's really not simple (but
> there is an easy solution ---see below). First, to use it in
> standard (pdf)LaTeX, see (a bit outdated but good):
> 
> http://www.radamir.com/tex/ttf-tex.htm
> 
> then, for the official guides, in your Terminal,
> 
> texdoc fntguide
> 
> and
> 
> texdoc fontinst
> 
> the latter should open
> 
> /usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-doc/doc/english/Type1fonts/fontinstallationguide.pdf
> 
> Now ---the easy solution: XeTeX (you already have it); see
> examples at
> 
> http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=xetex
> 
> For documentation, texdoc xetex  and  texdoc fontspec
> 
> Best,
> 
> Axel