[OS X TeX] Accessing TeX Live fonts from XeTeX

[Herbert Schulz]

On Aug 7, 2010, at 10:55 AM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I just installed MacTeX 2010-pretest and am testing stuff with fonts and XeTeX.
> Currently, I'm looking for the best way to use fonts shipped with TeX Live (eg
> Linux Libertine O) in my XeLaTeX documents.
> 
> On Windows and Linux, all you have to do is add the TL font trees to fontconfig
> search path (on Windows, this is done by the TL installer, on Linux you have to
> do it by hand). I guess XeTeX doesn't use fontconfig at all on OS X, since doing
> the same as on my Linux box didn't give the expected result.
> 
> So I though I had to install the fonts. I copied recursively TL opentype an
> truetype fonts trees, namely:
> 
> /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype
> /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype
> 
> to ~/Library/Fonts. It works just fine, but looks a little bit awkward to me to
> duplicated all the files. Moreover, when new fonts are added to the TL trees, I
> need to manually copy them in ~/Library/Fonts if I want them to be available to
> XeTeX. (I tried symlinking the TL font trees in ~/Library/Fonts instead of
> copying, but it didn't seem to work.)
> 
> So, my question is: did I miss anything? Is there any other, more practical or
> cleaner way to make TL fonts usable with XeTeX?
> 
> Thanks in advance, and sorry if I missed something obvious, I'm completely new
> to Mac OS X.
> 
> Manuel.

Howdy,

Did you simply try to use the fonts out of the box? Don't remember if that works or not.

If that doesn't work create add the fonts to the font library in Font Book. Open the Font Book application. For convenience create a File->New Library (Opt-Cmd-N), give it a name and have it selected. Then File->Add Fonts… and then (here's the trick) use the Go To Folder… command shortcut (Shift-Cmd-G) which will open up a dialog box to put in the path to the font folder. Enter /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype and press return. Select the public folder and press Open. That should put all the folders with fonts into the font library. (If it doesn't you have to enter the public folder and select all the individual font folders and press Open.)

Hope this helps.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)