lualatex makeindex : can I change the font ?

[Peter Flynn]

On 16/04/2025 12:08, Ken Moffat via tex-live wrote:
> I'm guessing this has been discussed somewhere in the past, but
> gurgle is giving me a lot of noise and links for macOS or the online
> way of writing LaTeX.

Gurgle (lovely name) is no longer useful for anything except 
AI-generated nonsense. I've switched to duckduckgo, which is a little 
better but not as robustly indexed.

> Years ago (2016 orearlier), when I thought (from reading online) that
> pdflatex was a good way to go, 

Back then it was. No longer.

> I created an essay using pdflatex, bibtex and makeindex.  I am now
> trying to update [...]
> So, a lot of editing needed.

Shouldn't be hardly any, but these days you need to:

a) use LuaLaTeX with the fontspec package instead of pdflatex with 
inputenc and fontenc; this lets you switch to using TTF/OTF fonts 
instead of Postscript Type 1;

b) use the biblatex package with the biber program instead of the old 
bibtex; barely any changes needed to your .bib file, but lots of nice 
enhancements).

> When I used pdflatex I could use \textsc{} for names, 

You still can. None of that has changed.

> particularly personal names (to help distinguish them from
> placenames, which were my original subject). I much prefer the open
> 'g' of DejaVu Serif, but that lacks a small cap font.
Ah. That's a wholly different question. If the typeface has no small 
caps font, then it has no small caps font, period. Technically it is 
possible in certain circumstances to fake up small caps for a font that 
lacks them, but IMNSHO it's never really much good.

The number of serif typefaces with a fish-hook lowercase 'g' AND a font 
of caps-and-small-caps is vanishingly small.

> Is it practical for me to specify a different font for Small Caps,
> both in makeindex and in the main text ?

If you switch to LuaLaTeX using the fontspec package (required) I think 
you can specify an alternate typeface for small caps, eg (here to get 
small caps for an old version of Times that did not have them, but the 
new TeX Gyre version does):

\setmainfont{Times New Roman}[
   SmallCapsFont={TeX Gyre Termes},
   SmallCapsFeatures={Letters=SmallCaps},
]

(see 
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/630809/small-caps-missing-and-font-choice-with-fontspec). 
So you could look for a font very similar to DejaVu which does have 
small caps, and try that.

Once you do that, I believe \textsc will work anywhere in the document, 
including the index. But do read the fontspec documentation.

Peter