[OS X TeX] Using FontBook to help XeTeX find TeXLive/MacTeX distributed fonts

[Michael Sharpe]

> 
> On Jan 30, 2016, at 6:23 AM, jfbu <jfbu at free.fr> wrote:
> 
> for many years I have been a bit frustrated with using XeLaTeX w.r.t. the OpenType fonts as distributed with MacTeX/TeXLive, rather than system fonts or fonts in ~/Library/Fonts.
> 
> The texlive recipe http://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-340003.4.4 is irrelevant to Mac OS X users, as XeTeX does not use fontconfig for us.
> 
> The usual recommendation is to make a copy into ~/Library/Fonts of those fonts one is interested into using.
> 
> Else, under LaTeX+fontspec one must load fonts via filenames, and one then has to specify explicitly the filenames for Bold, Italic, BoldItalic. Which is annoying. Also it makes testing/contributing posts to places like tex.stackexchange.com cumbersome, as people there are not generally using Mac OS X.

Many font packages in the TeXLIve distribution which contain Opentype fonts also contain one or more .fontspec files, usually located in a .../tex/latex/ branch, that work on all platforms and reduces the effort involved in font selection under xelatex. Just as an example, though not a good one typographically, 

\usepackage{fontspec}
\defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}
\setromanfont{erewhon} % reads erewhon.fontspec, extension of 'Utopia' 
\setsansfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{zhv} % reads zhv.fontspec in nimbus15, 'Helvetica'
\setmonofont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{zco} % reads zco.fontspec in nimbus15, 'Courier' Medium

You can easily create your own .fontspec files along the model of erewhon.fontspec, and no fiddling with FontBook or moving fonts to a Mac font folder is needed.

Michael