[tex-live] Xetex examples

[Alex Hamann]

On 12.05.2009, at 21:58, Ken Brown wrote:

> On 5/12/2009 4:52 PM, George N. White III wrote:
>> On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Ken Brown <kbrow1i at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Does TL2008 come with any examples of xetex or xelatex files that  
>>> can be
>>> typeset using only the fonts supplied by texlive?  I'm curious to  
>>> try out
>>> xetex, which I've never used before, but almost every example I  
>>> try gives me
>>> errors about fonts that are not installed.
>>>
> [...]
>> The whole point of xetex is to use "system" fonts, but you should  
>> be able
>> to do "xelatex sample2e" and get Computer Modern fonts.
>
> I guess I didn't phrase my question clearly.  I'd like to try out  
> xetex to see what it can do (and to see examples of how to do it).   
> Running xelatex sample2e doesn't help.
>
> Texlive ships a lot of opentype and truetype fonts.  I was hoping  
> to see examples that don't rely on "system fonts" that don't happen  
> to be installed on my system.
>
> Ken



Hi,

Just to provide some background:
There was a very similar discussion on the XeTeX mailing list a few  
days ago. The issue was that a user complained that the example files  
required Hoefler Text which he did not own. As both XeTeX and  
fontspec (which is the package providing access to system fonts which  
will obviously vary on every system) both predate TeXLive2008 quite a  
bit and both originate from a Mac background this is reflected by  
many/most examples that you will find. Also, not every font includes  
all the fontspec features.
The recommendation to the poster in the discussion I mentioned was to  
read the fontspec manual and write some test files based on the  
examples as shown in the fontspec manual but using fonts installed on  
his own system. The discussion then went on to consider whether a  
more Mac-independent manual would be desirable but since it requires  
a considerable re-write people agreed that the effort would better be  
put in different tasks.
I know that this does not really solve your problem but I still  
thought I should mention it.

Alex