[OS X TeX] Gentium help

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 2 sept. 06 à 18:06, Mohinish a écrit :

> I did try the XeTeX a bit, but probably because my TeXShop is an  
> older version and/or because I have so many other (some hacky)  
> packages, it kept throwing errors.

This most probably comes from your using packages (for example  
beamer) which rely on either dvips, pdfTeX or dvipdfm to do their  
job. For well-written packages, namely packages which call external  
driver-specific definition files, the situation has mostly been fixed  
already: this is for example the case with graphics/graphicx and  
color, for which Ross Moore has provided a xetex.def. For other  
packages, such as beamer, which include hard-coded switches for  
dvips, pdfTeX and dvipdfm only, the situation is gradually getting  
better.

Specifically, the most recent versions of XeTeX (like the current  
0.995 rev. D at the time of this writing), which are now cross- 
platform (Mac OS X/Windows/Linux), can work on the Mac with either  
the original extended DVI processor xdv2pdf (called implicitly at the  
end of each XeTeX run), or with xdvipdfmx an extended version of  
dvipdfmx. This means that, in case you choose to use xdvipdfmx  
instead of xdv2pdf, then you can use packages which include dvipdfm  
support (like beamer) by calling them with the option [dvipdfm].

How to select xdvipdfmx on the Mac? By invoking XeTeX in the form:

	xetex -output-driver='xdvipdfmx -q -E'
	xelatex -output-driver='xdvipdfmx -q -E'

This can probably be automated by creating a dedicated TeXShop engine.

There is a drawback to this appproach, though: while xdv2pdf can use  
any font known to OS X, xdvipdfmx can only use TrueType and OpenType  
fonts. This shouldn't affect Gentium.

Another reason for using XeTeX with Gentium: they both originate from  
SIL International, and in particular Jonathan Kew, the developer of  
XeTeX, knows Gentium (as well as Charis SIl and Doulos SIL) very well.

This type of question is generally answered very rapidly on the XeTeX  
mailing list <http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex>.

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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