[XeTeX] missing fonts on xetex in newbie installation on Mavericks mac

[Herbert Schulz]

On Aug 14, 2014, at 3:03 AM, Stratos Paschos <paschos.s at gmail.com> wrote:

> Considering that the fonts (Latin Modern Roman) have been installed,
> you have to  make them (and
> generally the fonts coming with TeX) known by the system. To do that,
> follow the suggestion by Herbert Schulz in the following link:
> 
> http://macosx-tex.576846.n2.nabble.com/Accessing-TeX-Live-fonts-from-XeTeX-td5383821.html
> 
> (substitute 2010 by 2014 in the path)
> 
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Tim <tim.at.ast at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I am a newbie to latex etc.  I want it to write docs with mixed arabic and english.  So I need unicode.
>> 
>> I downloaded the BasicTex package from :https://tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html.
>> 
>> It’s supposed to include xetex, which I gather the is the thing I need for Arabic text.
>> 
>  . . .
> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Tim
> 
> Stratos

Howdy,

I don't know if things have changed under Mavericks but the disadvantage of creating new font libraries in Font Book was that they had to be rebuild with every OS update, even minor ones like 10.8.3->10.8.4. I eventually ended up copying the opentype folder into ~/Library/Fonts. 

XeTeX seems to only look in the Mac fonts fonts folders if you refer to the fonts using font names. If you use font file names it uses the distribution's fonts. It's been that way for quite a long time.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)