xelatex, fontspec, linux
peter wilson
installed font without the latex installation palaver, and I had just
purchased a rather nice Type1 font of fleurons. (I did manage to install
it for use with latex but had to go via FontForge to reorganise the
character slots in the font).
I run on a Fedora 5 linux system and TeXlive 2008.
I found a lot of (often very contradictory and involved)
information on font installation in linux, but having managed to install
SIL's Gentium from an rpm I felt brave enough to try and install my new
font.
I put the .afm and .pfb files in a subdirectory under
/usr/share/fonts and then, as root ran:
fc-cache -f -v
which was all that was necessary according one web article. Running
fc-list did list the new font. I tried xelatex on a file where I used
\fontspec{Gentium} from the fontspec package and all was well. I then
tried the same with my new font and I got alphabetics instead of
fleurons. I tried specifying the font explicitly and got fleurons. I
wanted to supply a minimal example but couldn't as it involved a
commercial font. I then decided to try again, but with the WebOMints
font which is freely available (CTAN/fonts/webomints).
I put WebOMintsGD.afm and WebOMintsGD.pfb into /usr/share/fonts/Webo
and again ran fc-cache -f -v, and fc-list showed the WebOMints font.
I ran xelatex on the file web.tex (attached) with varying results.
The first time, last night, it failed with a `malloc memory exhausted'
(the previously successful Gentium file did the same when I tried that
again). I shut down the system and rebooted this evening. This time
web.tex was processed successfully.
In web.tex I tried two approaches. The ones using fontspec (e.g.
\fontspec{WebOMintsGD}) produced alphabetics whereas the ones where I
defined:
\font\test="WebOMintsGD" at 14pt
\test
...
produced the expected symbols.
Does anyone have aclue as to what I have done wrong and how to
install (Type1) fonts as system fonts on a linux box and use \fontspec
to get them into a xelatex document?
Thanks
Peter W.
PS. I have attached another file, showweb.tex that when xetex'ed
displays a table of the glyphs in WebOMintsGD. This is based on a
posting (to the XeTeX list?) by Guido Herzog, 24 Sep 2009, "Re: {XeTeX]
Trouble with displaying word containing 3 conjunct consonants in
Devanagari"
Will Robertson
> In web.tex I tried two approaches. The ones using fontspec (e.g.
> \fontspec{WebOMintsGD}) produced alphabetics whereas the ones where I
> defined:
> \font\test="WebOMintsGD" at 14pt
> \test
> ...
> produced the expected symbols.
That's very odd!
> Does anyone have aclue as to what I have done wrong and how to
> install (Type1) fonts as system fonts on a linux box and use \fontspec
> to get them into a xelatex document?
If no-one has any idea, it would be worth also asking on the XeTeX
mailing list; people there tend to have more expertise at this sort of
problem. (Unfortunately, I'm not on Linux, so I've really got no idea
what the problem might be.)
Will
Guenter Milde
> On 2009-11-11 10:36:03 +1030, peter wilson <herrie...@earthlink.net> said:
>> In web.tex I tried two approaches. The ones using fontspec (e.g.
>> \fontspec{WebOMintsGD}) produced alphabetics whereas the ones where I
>> defined:
>> \font\test="WebOMintsGD" at 14pt
>> \test
>> ...
>> produced the expected symbols.
> That's very odd!
Could it be that the Fleurons and WebOMintsGD fonts are not Unicoded encoded?
>> Does anyone have aclue as to what I have done wrong and how to
>> install (Type1) fonts as system fonts on a linux box and use \fontspec
>> to get them into a xelatex document?
I install system fonts on my Debian system simply by moving them to a
folder under ~/.fonts. They "automagically" show up in e.g. Abiword,
Inkscape, Gucharmap, Ooffice, ... - which I recommend for testing the
proper working outside of XeTeX.
Günter
Ulrike Fischer
> I have at last decided to try xelatex because it could use any
> installed font without the latex installation palaver, and I had just
> purchased a rather nice Type1 font of fleurons. (I did manage to install
> it for use with latex but had to go via FontForge to reorganise the
> character slots in the font).
> In web.tex I tried two approaches. The ones using fontspec (e.g.
> \fontspec{WebOMintsGD}) produced alphabetics whereas the ones where I
> defined:
> \font\test="WebOMintsGD" at 14pt
> \test
> ...
> produced the expected symbols.
Sounds as if two different fonts are used. Add \XeTeXtracingfonts=1
to your web.tex and check in the log-files from the two variants the
font pathes. Call xelatex --output-driver="xdvipdfmx -vv" to get
messages from xdvipdfmx. And check in den Adobe reader the font
lists.
--
Ulrike Fischer
peter wilson
Thank you for this which I have tried.
The font information in the log files indicate that in both the
\fontspec and \test cases the same webo font is found --- the one I
installed in /usr/share/fonts/Webo.
Adobe listed the webo font in the \test case but not in the
\fontspec case.
Checking the xdvipdfmx messages showed that the correct webo font
was among the messages in the \test case but was absent in the \fontspec
case.
It seems that in the \test case the webo font was used throughout
the process but in the \fontspec case, having been picked up by xelatex
it dissappeared somewhere after that.
Peter W.
peter wilson
Thanks to all who offered help. I think that I have resolved the
problem. In the web.tex minimal example file I provided I had:
...
\usepackage{fontspec}
\fontspec{WebOMintsGD}
\begin{document}
...
which didn't work as I expected.
Whereas
...
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmaintfont{WebOMintsGD}
\begin{document}
...
gave me the result I was expecting.
Using
...
\usepackage{fontspec}
\begin{document}
\fontspec{WebOMintsGD}
...
also worked.
Peter W.