[XeTeX] Disable "mktextfm" and/or use of TFM-based fonts ?

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Wed, 8 Jun 2022 09:43:19 +0100 schrieb Philip Taylor (Hellenic
Institute):

> On 08/06/2022 08:51, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
>> Am Tue, 7 Jun 2022 11:44:28 +0100 schrieb Philip Taylor (Hellenic
>> Institute):
>>
>>> As I /never/ want XeTeX to attempt to create a seemingly-missing TFM
>>> file, can I configure XeTeX and/or TeXworks to inhibit this undesired
>>> behaviour ?
>> Perhaps by setting MKTEXTFM = 0, but I never tried if xetex honors
>> that. But even if that work: you would still get errors from your
>> code, so why bother?
> Thank you, I will try that.  Error messages I would expeect — an attempt 
> to create a font (or even a font metric file), I would not — typesetting 
> should utilise existing resources, not attempt to create new ones.  Or 
> to put it another way, TeX is a typesetting engine, and should not 
> pretend to be a poor man's "make".

Sorry but I think it is one of the nice features of a modern tex
system that it creates tfm or pk fonts on the fly. And if I may say:
xetex is doing that internally too for your open type fonts: it is
still tex and needs tfm files. Do you want to miss that feature and
have to prepare the tfm files your self before using a font?


>>
>>> And for that matter, can I configure XeTeX and/or TeXworks
>>> to inhibit any attempt to use TFM-based fonts ?
>> Do you really want that? Don't you use tfm based math fonts?
> 
> Not intentionally, since I rarely if ever typeset maths.  But if I /were 
> /to need to insert a fragment of maths into a document that I would 
> typesetting, I would like to be warned if XeTeX needed to fall back on 
> the Computer Modern (or similar) fonts.

XeTeX doesn't fallback. It uses the fonts that your format and your
code tells it to use. If you prefer to use unicode math fonts, here
is a receipt what you have to change in plain for this:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/308749/2388



-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/