[OS X TeX] General Font Question

[Jonathan Kew]

On 13 Mar 2010, at 13:54, Manuel wrote:

> 
> Am 13/03/2010 um 14:17 schrieb Franck Pastor:
> 
>> 
>> Le 13 mars 10 à 14:00, Peter Dyballa a écrit :
> 
>>> That's no font for Mac OS X. When you dont use Classic you can free some disk space by removing this file.

Not true, OS X does still support FFIL + LWFN fonts, although they're definitely not the preferred format any more.

> 
> But I can and do use Provence with no trouble.
> 
> Does this mean that this kind of font is just not supported by LaTeX? Then I would assume that I can't really use "any font installed in the OS".

That's true, in general.

With xelatex, you should be able to use *almost* "any font installed in the OS" ..... specifically, you should be able to use any installed TrueType or OpenType font.

The reason you got an error with Provence is that it's a "classic" Mac Type 1 font (packaged as a "suitcase" of bitmaps plus "LWFN" files containing PostScript resources), and this format is not supported by xetex's default output driver.

It would probably work if you run xelatex with the xdv2pdf output driver, although this is becoming less reliable with newer Mac OS X releases as it is not really supported any more. If you want to try, though, you could run

    xelatex -output-driver=xdv2pdf yourfile.tex

where yourfile.tex uses the fontspec package (as illustrated previously) to select Provence.

In general, though, I'd recommend looking for a more up-to-date font that suits your needs, in OpenType or TrueType format, as support for the old LWFN-based PostScript fonts is likely to dwindle as time goes by.

JK