[XeTeX] XeLaTeX - Tamil font problems in Ubuntu Linux

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi,

use

name at computer > fc-list | grep TaM

or something similar. This will give a list of fonts installed on your computer, either in "system-wide" font directories or in your personal font directory (usually $HOME/.fonts). This command will also provide you with the "xelatex" name of the font. Example, on my system:

rooijen at rine12 ~ $ fc-list | grep Koz
Kozuka Mincho Pro\-VI,小塚明朝 Pro\-VI,Kozuka Mincho Pro\-VI R,小塚明朝 Pro\-VI R:style=R,Regular
Kozuka Gothic Pro\-VI,小塚ゴシック Pro\-VI,Kozuka Gothic Pro\-VI M,小塚ゴシック Pro\-VI M:style=M,Regular

In xelatex, I would use 

\fontspec[Mapping=tex-text]{Kozuka Mincho Pro-VI}

If this does not help, another "dirty trick" is to see if OpenOffice by accident uses your Tamil-font, and then you can use the name reported by OpenOffice. If that also fails, install fontforge on your computer and use that to view the details of any particular font on your computer. In FontForge, you will see for instance that each font has several names associated with it, and xelatex cannot use all of those tags, only a smaller subset.

Cheers,
Wilfred



--- On Thu, 3/12/09, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa at Web.DE> wrote:

> From: Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa at Web.DE>
> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] XeLaTeX - Tamil font problems in Ubuntu Linux
> To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
> Date: Thursday, 3 December, 2009, 6:27 AM
> 
> Am 02.12.2009 um 21:30 schrieb P. P. Narayanaswami:
> 
> > How to handle the fonts like TSC_times  or
> TAM_Kalyani to produce tamil
> > outpurt?
> 
> 
> A font has more than one name. Maybe a short "family name"
> without underscore exists...
> 
> If not, you can create a hard or sym-link of the the font
> file and give it a name without underscore. Then load this
> file name with fontspec. Maybe this helps to solve your
> problem...
> 
> --
> Greetings
> 
>   Pete
> 
> If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.
> 
> 


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