Comments on: Fonts in LaTeX, Part Two: pdfTeX and OpenType

By: Eddie Kohler

Eddie Kohler — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:41:02 +0000

Hi, nice tutorial. There is one line I would change, however.

\DeclareFontShape{U}{Pagella}{m}{n}{ <-> TeXGyrePagella-Regular–custom–base }{}

I’d leave off the “–base”. Your font had some typographic features that are too complex for a single TeX font to support directly, so otftotfm generated a “virtual font,” TeXGyrePagella-Regular–custom, that refers to a “base font” containing most of the glyphs. If you refer to the “–base” font in LaTeX rather than the “virtual font,” you won’t get those typographic features.

By: washburn

washburn — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:05:57 +0000

@Mirza: Can you be more specific? Are all the fonts that are actually used in your document embedded, or are there some that are missing that it is relying on the operating environment to supply? Does the document display correctly?

By: Mirza Tayyab

Mirza Tayyab — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 20:55:00 +0000

I am having a problem while generating PDF. Some of the fonts are not embedded. I want to know that how can I neglect(not use) those fonts while generating PDF.

By: washburn

washburn — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:30:49 +0000

@RiderLemur: There may be some fairly experimental systems, like Platypus, but it might be better to ask yourself why you don't want to use TeX, because there are really no other systems that even come close in terms of power and quality of typeset output. Knowing why you don't want to use TeX would help guide my suggestions. If you don't need to typeset mathematics and don't need to write complicated macros, maybe you should consider InDesign. If the problem is that what I've written in this part of the tutorial seems excessively complicated, it may be better to look into XeLaTeX. If you still need microtypography support and/or find TeX's macro language abysmal, I would recommend investigating luatex. It doesn't yet have macro packages that will completely automate the use of TrueType and OpenType fonts out-of-the-box yet, but now that a non-beta release is available, people will probably write such things fairly soon.

By: RiderLemur

RiderLemur — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:24:37 +0000

That’s some tutorial. So does anyone know of a computer typesetting system that supports Unicode fonts and *isn’t* based on TeX?

By: washburn

washburn — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:14:21 +0000

@Jim: Well, it depends on your needs.

In my dissertation, I only used Chinese to render the names of a few of my colleagues, so it was not too much work to put together a pdfTeX configuration much in the way I described for those few glyphs.

If you really need to typeset large numbers of Chinese/Japanese/Korean glyphs, using XeTeX is probably the least painful solution for now, and I’m not sure how much microtypography really matters for improving the typesetting of those languages anyway. If you’re using XeTeX, it is pretty much as simple as having an appropriate font installed and being able to easily enter the glyphs in UTF8.

If that is still not clear enough, let me know and I can go into more detail.

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:19:49 +0000

Thanks for these tutorials, but what would really be a boon to us poor TeX using graduate students would be a tutorial on how to add Chinese/Japanese/(Korean) fonts to TeX.

Cheers!