[XeTeX] XeTeX and font specimens

[Stephen Moye]

On Monday, April 24, 2006, at 11:00AM, William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com> wrote:

>I've gotten started with producing a font specimen book here at work  
>and am using Stephen Moye's nifty TypeSpec Plain TeX macros from CTAN.
>
>It's working well (had to do a bit of bug-fixing on the files, copy- 
>pasting some macros which seem to've been left out) but things are  
>off to a good start. A couple of observations / queries:
>
>  - Stephen, would it be okay if I create a LaTeX version (a package  
>or documentclass) of these files w/ a front-end that lets one easily  
>plug in font names to generate samples?

By all means! That would be really wonderful.

>  - Should XeTeX be working with a font manager? I'm using Linotype's  
>free FontExplorer X to activate fonts and it's mostly working  
>(Bickham Script Pro Bold wouldn't work, but Regular and Semibold  
>did). I thought there'd been discussion that this _wasn't_ supposed  
>to work.

My 2¢: FEX has always worked like a charm for me. Some of the
earlier betas had some behavior problems, but that seems to be in
the past. Worth every penny. Question is, does it (can it) work under
Rosetta? How soon will there be a new version that works natively with
Intel Macs?

>  - How should the performance be? It's taking minutes to generate a  
>sample page for the Caslon sample --- could this be caused by the  
>fonts not being loaded by the system? Or something strange in the way  
>the typespec macros request the fonts? I'm getting lots of error  
>messages about missing fonts....
>
> From the log file:
>
>> ! I can't find file `ACaslonPro-BoldItalic'.
>> <*> ...1; nonstopmode; input ACaslonPro-BoldItalic
>>
>> Please type another input file name
>> ! Emergency stop.
>> <*> ...1; nonstopmode; input ACaslonPro-BoldItalic
>>
>> Transcript written on mfput.log.
>> grep: ACaslonPro-BoldItalic.log: No such file or directory
>> mktextfm: `mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1;  
>> nonstopmode; input ACaslonPro-BoldItalic' failed to make ACaslonPro- 
>> BoldItalic.tfm.
>> the leading=10.79753pt [1] )
>> (see the transcript file for additional information)
>> Output written on ACaslon.pdf (1 page).
>> Transcript written on ACaslon.log.
>
>But it still generates a .pdf w/ embedded subsets --- I'm working my  
>way through the xetex_doc/samples directory and not seeing this sort  
>of thing.
>
>William