[OS X TeX] Fontspec issue

[Michael Sharpe]

> On Nov 27, 2021, at 9:15 AM, Rowland McDonnell <rowland.mcdonnell at physics.org> wrote:
> 
> I’m baffled. Would anyone be so kind as to explain what’s going on with Fontbook.app - that is, how come I’m filtering for OpenType but being shown something that’s apparently not OpenType, whether or not I can expect to be able to use Book Antiqua, and if so how I might do so?
> 
I can't explain the behavior of Fontbook but I can address the other part of your question.  By he way, Truetype preceded Opentype by several years and Opentype is considered an extension of TrueType with support for the CFF font format (essentially, PostScript) so the terminology can be very imprecise now. Many people take Truetype to mean simply quadratic bezier outlines and emsize 2048, while PostScript has cubic bezier outlines and an emsize of 1000. 

First of all, a Mac font suitcase is an ancient container format built first for bitmap fonts and later fo rTruetype fonts, all stored in the resource fork, with Truetype fonts as sfnt resources. Being stored in a resource fork means that most modern applications can't use them directly. Neither xelatex nor lualatex can use them. You will have to extract the ttf files from the font suitcase and save them as normal ttf files. There are at least two ways to do this with free software.

1. Install FontForge. It can open a font suitcase, ask which face you wish to open and export (``generate'') to a ttf file.

2. Install Resource Finagler from 
http://www.markdouma.com/developer/ResourceFinagler.zip

This will all you to see the resources and drag them to a Finder window to export them. You will have to rename them appropriately. 

With both 1 and 2, xelatex generated a pdf that appeared to be blank in the TeXShop Preview window, but which rendered perfectly in Adobe Acrobat. I have no idea why.

Michael