[XeTeX] Disable "mktextfm" and/or use of TFM-based fonts ?

[John Was]

Hello Philip

I've sometimes encountered inexplicable behaviour like this, and if there's
the slightest hint of a problem with plain XeTeX locating and loading a
font in a particular way, I load it directly from the font file itself,
e.g.:

\font\ffthornreight="[D:/BACKUPS/FONTBKUP/EHRHARDT/FFTHORN/FFThorn-Regular_2.otf]"
scaled 720

Everything in front of FFThorn-Regular_2.otf (the font file) is of course
the location of the font on my data drive - just substitute your own
directory tree for the fonts you want to load this way.

Hope this helps.  It's not a TeX Wizard solution, obviously, but if all you
want to do is get on with the typesetting it works!


John *🇪🇺 * Слава Україні!* 🇺🇦*



On Tue, 7 Jun 2022 at 11:45, Philip Taylor (Hellenic Institute) <
P.Taylor at hellenic-institute.uk> wrote:

> Using XeTeX as my only TeX typesetting engine, I also use only OTF/TTF
> fonts.  After a faulty copy-and-paste, I found that I had inadvertently
> written :
>
> \font \fnf = \font \fb "Gill Sans MT" scaled 400
>
> which led to the unexpected diagnostic :
>
> Usage: mktextfm [--destdir destdir] name
>
>
> ! Font \fnf= not loadable: Metric (TFM) file or installed font not found.
>
> <to be read again>
>
> \font
>
> l.441 \font \fnf = \font
>
> \fb "Gill Sans MT" scaled 400
>
> As I *never* want XeTeX to attempt to create a seemingly-missing TFM
> file, can I configure XeTeX and/or TeXworks to inhibit this undesired
> behaviour ?  And for that matter, can I configure XeTeX and/or TeXworks to
> inhibit any attempt to use TFM-based fonts ?
>
> --
> *Philip Taylor*
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/attachments/20220607/1b8782db/attachment.html>