[tex-live] Unicode font support

[George N. White III]

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:07 PM, Timothy Legg <tim_legg_iowa at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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 usually find that confusion levels peak just before things start to
make sense.   To be confused you have to know
enough to be asking questions.

> 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.

So you are using TeX for speed and not for any special math or other
capabilities.


> 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?).
>

As others have mentioned, you are seeing xeTeX, which is designed to
support "system" fonts.  It sounds like
it might be a good match for your project, but look at the samples and
ask if there are things you need that don't
seem to be supported.

> 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...
>

TeX started out with its own font system, so as you discovered, using
a new font normally involves some effort to provide metrics and
encodings in the legacy form. XeTeX generates the needed information
directly from the fonts.   This works well for regular text, but for
maths xetex falls back to the standard TeX mechanisms.

You may need to worry about things like hyphenation rules to make the
most of TeX's layout capabilities, and some languages have rules that
may be tricky to implement in TeX (but which might serve to amuse some
of the people who contribute to TeX).


> 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
>
>
>
>



-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia