[XeTeX] Suddenly fonts are not found

[Jon Breitenbucher]

Hmm, even when I open the fontspec documentation I get strange  
characters and Helvetica substituted. I haven't done anything with  
fonts on the system so I am very puzzled by this sudden change in  
behavior.

On May 7, 2008, at 10:15 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

>
> On 7 May 2008, at 2:58 pm, Jon Breitenbucher wrote:
>
>> Hello all. I hope someone can give me an idea of what may be
>> happening. I have documents that I typeset less than a month ago with
>> XeTeX and yesterday when I opened the PDF output all the math
>> characters are being shown with Helvetica as a substitute. They were
>> fine when I viewed and printed them last month. Now when I typeset
>> them I get things like
>>
>> *** font activation failed (status=0): lmsy8.pfb
>>
>> *** font lmsy8 (LMMathSymbols8-Italic: file 'lmsy8.pfb') not found
>>
>> sudo texhash does not fix it and the LM fonts are available to the
>> system. Typesetting with just PDFLaTeX works fine. I'm stumped.
>> Thanks.
>
>
> I'm not sure what's changed on your system so as to break things, but
> the simplest solution is probably to run xdvipdfmx instead of xdv2pdf
> as the output driver.
>
> Those messages are coming from xdv2pdf when it's trying to use a .pfb
> font, which OS X doesn't support natively. To do this, it uses an
> auxiliary tool to "wrap" the .pfb in a pseudo-OpenType structure, and
> then asks OS X to activate that font. But apparently this is failing
> for you. Any recent system updates? Reinstallation of TeX stuff?
>
> Anyhow, if you tell xetex to use xdvipdfmx, the problem should go
> away as that driver uses the pfb files directly. (It can do this
> because it doesn't rely on OS X font/graphics services.)
>
> JK
>
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_________________________________________
I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very  
little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of  
such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.   
(Karl Friedrich Gauss)

Jon Breitenbucher, Ph. D.
Adjunct Professor and Instructional Technology Specialist
The College of Wooster
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
308 E. University
Wooster, Ohio 44691

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