[XeTeX] "Missing" system fonts

[John Was]

Dear Bruno

Yes - thanks for that.  I realized after one response that I was not 
distinguishing between XeTeX itself and the files and programs that XeTeX 
invokes.  I'm very grateful for all these tips on setting the system up but 
I wish there was a manual that I could print out (buy even!) which laid all 
this out - I'm having to take notes so that when I need to do it again I'll 
know what to change, but it shouldn't really be necessary.  The old 4AllTeX 
installation had the right approach:  as soon as you put the CD in, it asked 
you various questions (Are you going to use PostScript fonts? What is the 
path to the location of your TeX files?  What is the path to the location of 
your graphics files? etc. etc.), and then it simply did everything for you - 
with instructions on what files will need to be manually updated in future 
if, for example, you decide to relocate your TeX files elsewhere.  Access to 
psfonts.map, the file users probably want to alter most frequently, is 
through a simple menu system within the DOS shell interface, so one never 
has the sense of having to ferret around in the system to manage the 
installation.  I'm sure this could very easily be added to the installation 
procedure for XeTeX on the TeXLive distribution - it would save novices like 
me from asking a lot of daft questions!  (But it's nice to know people are 
so helpful.)

I think the [ ] round fonts could be of use in any case if one just wanted 
to see what a font looked like before bothering to install it properly - I 
only suggested it to the user in case he needed to get some output quickly.

Best

John

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bruno Voisin" <bvoisin at mac.com>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2007 8:27 AM
Subject: JunkEmail: Re: [XeTeX] "Missing" system fonts


Le 25 mai 07 à 08:59, John Was a écrit :

> I'm a novice with XeTeX (on Windows) and haven't yet worked out the
> niceties
> of font access, but I have found that fonts I haven't installed on my
> system, or fonts which XeTeX seems to be having trouble locating,
> can be
> accessed by going directly to the font file and putting square
> brackets
> round the name (as in the documentation), e.g.
>
> \font\outlinefont = [d:/temp/MinionPro-Regular] at  14pt

If you've got to do that in order to access a font, then I would
suspect a misconfiguration of your system. The problem does not seem
to lie within XeTeX, but within fontconfig upon which XeTeX relies to
access fonts on Windows. Hence it's the doc of fontconfig you should
look at, not that of XeTeX.

Useful tips have been given already:

> Le 22 mai 07 à 10:14, Akira Kakuto a écrit :
>
>> You have to run a command
>> fc-cache -v
>> in order to create data files for fontconfig.

> Le 22 mai 07 à 10:43, Akira Kakuto a écrit :
>
>> Please go to the directory .../bin/win32/conf/
>> and edit the file fonts.conf:
>>
>> line 16 of fonts.conf is
>> <dir>c:/windows/fonts</dir>
>>
>> Please rewrite this line as
>> <dir>YourDriveLetter:/YourSystemFontDir</dir>
>>
>> and run fc-cache -v once more.

If you don't do that, fontconfig won't know where to look for fonts,
neither will it index the fonts already present on your system. As a
result, XeTeX won't be able to find the fonts, unless you take it by
the hand and give it the full paths for the font you are using; which
is precisely what you seem to be doing.

And also, but that's probably more relevant to PDF file generation
than to font inclusion:

> Le 21 mai 07 à 11:55, caapv 208 a écrit :
>
>> --- John Was <john.was at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Here is my dvipdfmx.cfg file as requested - doesn't
>>> mean a lot to me!
>>
>> You have:
>>
>> %%
>> %% GhostScript (Unix/Linux):
>> D "gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sPAPERSIZE=a0 ...
>>
>> %% GhostScript (Win32):
>> %D "gswin32c -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sPAPERSIZE=a0 ...
>>
>> If you are on Win32, then you have to activate the
>> latter.

If you don't do that, xdvipdfmx, which XeTeX invokes behind the scene
to produce PDF files, will use a configuration appropriate for Linux,
not Windows. Accordingly, it's not surprising the generated PDF
files, if any, won't behave as expected.

I can't help more, as I'm a Mac user since circa 1988 and have never
(I'm not kidding!) used Windows, other than giving a hand to friends
and colleagues now and then.

Bruno Voisin
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