[Bug 455995] No OpenType

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Summary: No OpenType


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455995





------- Additional Comments From gaburici at cs.umd.edu  2008-07-23 17:06 EST -------
(In reply to comment #23)
> Vasile, are you saying that XeTeX can't use TrueType OpenType fonts and only
> handles CFF OpenType?

No, XeTeX can "handle" both flavors of OpenType. I put handle in quotes because
XeTeX internally generates an exteneded dvi (.xdv), which is then ran through a
driver to produce pdf; I don't think postscript output is possible. One can tell
XeTeX to write the xdv to a file, but I don't know of any viewers for xdv. 

On Linux the driver that converts xdv to pdf is xdvipdfmx. (On Macs one can also
choose xdv2pdf, which makes use of AAT - Apple's Advanced Typography). So, font
support on Linux is entirely dependent on what xdvipdfmx does. Given that the
extended dvi stuff was originally developed for East Asian languaes, the English
documentation is a bit spotty. Here's what I've been able to determine:
- both TrueType and and OpenType/CFF are supported and are embedded in the pdf.
- for both formats xdvipdfmx uses the CID encoding for the embedded font. XeTeX
understands only UTF-8. The conversion of encodings is handled transparently by
xdvipdfmx, and the pdf is searchable except for ligatures. (In contrast, pdftex
1.4 can handle those correctly).
- there is confusion whether "bare" type-1 fonts are well supported or not by
xdvipdfmx. I've seen things go both ways. The default fonts for XeTeX are Latin
Modern, which come as type-1 (and work). Unfortunately, in Fedora you cannot
select them manually (say after switching to another font set), because that
requires the OTF files, which Fedora doesn't ship. TeXLive upstream includes
both type-1 and OTF/CFF versions of Latin Modern. To further complicate this
issue, direct type-1 support was apparently added in Feb 2008 for fonts that
support the EU1 (TeX) encoding, which apparently is exactly Unicode. See this:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/xetex/latex/euenc/. Insofar I refrained
from filing a bug on Fedora's TeXLive for missing the Latin Modern OTF's...
- finally, xdvipdfmx searches both the traditional TeX map paths and makes use
of fontconfig to find fonts. I think fontconfig takes precedence.









 at least when PDFs are generated. I was living under the misguided impression
that CFF was superior for printing.


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