[OS X TeX] Accented characters in Xe(La)TeX

[cfrees at imapmail.org]

On Mon 31st May, 2010 at 00:10, Peter Dyballa seems to have written:

>
> Am 30.05.2010 um 23:21 schrieb cfrees at imapmail.org:
>
>> and I get weirdness only for Venturis regular without a location...
>> 
>> When you say they come from a font service, do you mean from the OS
>> font management? Or from TeX's knowledge of fonts?
>
> TeX has no knowledge of available fonts, it trusts in records and mappings – 
> and then fails... What I meant is the Mac OS X font service which, I think, 
> XeTeX asks. Similarly on other platforms. Xdvipdfmx just accepts these 
> results and forwards them into the PDF output.
>
That's what I thought originally, I think...
>> 
>>> Fontspec also gives you the option to tell XeTeX the particular font file 
>>> to be used. Try that for ADF Venturis!
>> 
>> Aha. That works. (I get the usual missing characters but not the
>> weirdness.)
>
>
> So you seem to have a "garbled font cache" – possible cures: clean the font 
> cache with utilities (you certainly remember from the time when pdfTeX had 
> this nasty bug)

I remember the discussions of it but was never affected by it. However,
googling discovered instructions for clearing it.

> and then reboot, or do a safe reboot (or such) and then a 
> normal reboot, or install AppleJack and you can clean the caches, or fix the 
> file systems, before booting into multi-user mode after a shutdown.

At least, I removed /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS, rebooted,
re-disabled bunches of fonts in Font Book and re-resolved duplicates. I
then re-typeset the file in TeXShop. I forgot to delete the old output,
so I did that and typeset again.

Still the same weirdness.

I also remembered that the file ought not to have typeset with the
usual XeLaTeX engine because I used External Location but it didn't
complain and still typesets the line which specifies the file location
correctly (bar missing characters) but not the line where the location
is not specified. (Claim that it shouldn't work is based on the
fontspec documentation which states this works only with xdvipdfmx and
that this isn't the default on OS X.)

So now I have some things working which shouldn't & some things not
working which should?!

Problems you never knew you had always turn out to be especially
annoying...

Thanks,
cfr