[OS X TeX] OS X TeX Font Loading Suggestion

[Richard J Benish]

Thanks everybody for the promising tips and to Peter for the specific answer.

I have some exploring to do.

Richard Benish


>Am 18.07.2011 um 22:26 schrieb Richard J Benish:
>
>>  Having a background in graphic arts and being old enough to 
>>remember the days of Macintosh "font management" applications, why 
>>not have such a thing for LaTex?
>
>Because LaTeX does not use any fonts!
>
>TeX uses only the metrics of the glyphs found in a font. And it uses 
>one or two different re-encodings of the font's original encoding. 
>Convertors, or output drivers, like dvips, dvipdfm, or pdfTeX with 
>its integrated convertor finally use font files, their re-encodings, 
>and MAP files which map a TeX font name to a real font file on disk. 
>It has become a bit complicated due to the restrictions to seven or 
>eight bits, which makes it necessary to provide sets of files for 
>Latin based scripts (which can have so many different modifiers or 
>accents), Cyrillic based scripts, old and modern Greek, aboriginal 
>scripts, Right-To-Left (RTL) scripts like Arabic or Hebrew, the many 
>Indic scripts, CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean), ...
>
>One single tool might not be able to manage this broad range - and 
>the few specialised TeX clients that can handle RTL or CJK or ...
>
>LuaTeX and XeTeX were developed to use Unicode encoded fonts 
>(OpenType and TrueType) quite directly. They can also use PostScript 
>fonts. XeTeX depends on a font manager or a font service in its host 
>system (but allows direct access of font files somewhere in the file 
>system as well) while LuaTeX first creates a "hash" file of the 
>system's font inventory. This needs to be updated manually due to 
>font changes while XeTeX instantaneously takes profit from sanely 
>administering the system's fonts.
>
>--
>Greetings
>
>   Pete