[XeTeX] math in XeLaTeX at 11pt or 12pt

[Jonathan Kew]

What a wonderfully short test document to illustrate the problem, Ross!

However, it works fine for me.....!

I think I know what's wrong. You can confirm my suspicions by  
(temporarily) removing your Textures CM fonts from /System\  
Folder/Fonts, and trying again. I think it will then work (provided it  
finds the .otf fonts; you may need to apply the installation patch  
posted yesterday, if you run into the same problem Stephen Moye  
reported). Please let me know if this does indeed fix the problem.

What's happening is that when LaTeX executes \font=.... to load the  
math fonts at 12pt, xetex is finding your Textures CM fonts, as those  
are available as installed fonts within OS X (Apple Type Services). So  
it considers that these should be used in "AAT mode", using ATSUI APIs  
directly to measure and draw text, and not loading a .tfm file at all.  
But this means that these fonts do not have enough \fontdimen values  
defined to be usable as math symbol fonts. (The XeTeX Notes file has a  
brief note on these two "modes" of font use, AAT-based and TFM-based.)

If you remove the Textures fonts, then ATSUI doesn't find any installed  
font with the name "cmsy12" (or whatever), and so xetex loads the .tfm  
file and proceeds as you'd expect (and then xdv2pdf will need to find  
the corresponding .otf file in order to render the glyphs).

This problem doesn't happen at the 10pt size because the .tfms are  
already preloaded as part of the format file.

Possible ways forward (besides requiring you to remove the Textures  
fonts, which isn't really a solution as you may want them there!):

1) reverse the priority of font loading in xetex, so that it looks  
first for a .tfm file, and only for an installed font if no .tfm is  
found

2) provide a separate \XeTeXfont command for using AAT fonts,  
restricting \font to TFM mode only

3) ensure that we build format files with all the sizes of math symbol  
and extension fonts \preloaded from .tfms, so that they'll always be  
used in .tfm mode

(3) is inherently shaky, as users who don't know much about fonts or  
rebuilding formats may want to use additional math fonts that weren't  
anticipated. Of the other options, I think I prefer (1), but comments  
would be welcome. (In practice, it seems unlikely that there will be a  
reason to prefer AAT-mode typesetting using a font for which a .tfm  
file is available; and for general text use, users shouldn't have to  
care whether a font is AAT- or TFM-based.)

Incidentally, this is probably also the explanation why someone (was it  
you, Ross?) was having trouble with a locally-rebuilt xetex.xfmt;  
xeinitex had been finding installed CM fonts rather than .tfm files.  
(An .xfmt that includes preloaded AAT-mode fonts will necessarily be  
somewhat fragile, as it will depend on the installed fonts in the OS X  
environment. It shouldn't lead to the malloc() failure that was  
reported, though, so I'll look into that.)

Jonathan

On 30 Apr 2004, at 1:18 am, Ross Moore wrote:

> Hi Jonathan,
>
> The simplest of LaTeX files ...
>
> \documentclass[12pt]{article}
> \begin{document}
> $
>  a
> $
>  \end{document}
>
> fails on the mathematics, with an error:
>
> ! Math formula deleted: Insufficient symbol fonts.
> l.7 $
>
>
>
> Here's the full log-file:
>
> [GlenLivet:~/Documents/tests] rossmoor% xelatex xtest.tex
> This is XeTeXk, Version 3.14159-2.1-0.5 (Web2C 7.5.2)
>  %&-line parsing enabled.
> entering extended mode
> (./xtest.tex
> LaTeX2e <2001/06/01>
> Babel <v3.7h> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german,  
> ngerman, n
> ohyphenation, loaded.
> (/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/article.cls
> Document Class: article 2001/04/21 v1.4e Standard LaTeX document class
> (/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size12.clo)) (./xtest.aux)
> ! Math formula deleted: Insufficient symbol fonts.
> l.7 $
>
>
> Tracing with  \tracingall  reveals nothing untoward at that point.
>
> The error goes away upon changing the initial font-size from  12pt
> to  TeX's default of  10pt.    At  11pt  the error remains.
>
> Using
>     xelatex -kpathsea-debug=-1 xtest.tex
> I cannot recognise anything that indicates a problem.
>
>
> Needless to say, there is no such problem when using
> other engines:   latex, pdflatex, elatex
>
>
>
> The message is compiled into TeX engines:
>
> [GlenLivet:~/Documents/tests] rossmoor% strings `kpsewhich tex.pool` |  
> grep Insuff
> 47Math formula deleted: Insufficient symbol fonts
> 50Math formula deleted: Insufficient extension fonts
>
> which sort of explains why tracing doesn't help.
>
>
> All the best,
>
> 	Ross
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -
> Ross Moore                                         ross at maths.mq.edu.au
> Mathematics Department                             office: E7A-419
> Macquarie University                               tel: +61 +2 9850  
> 8955
> Sydney, Australia                                  fax: +61 +2 9850  
> 8114
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