I don’t actually know of anyone who read this blog that uses LaTeX (the joys of which I have blogged of in the past), but after spending way too much time today trying to figure out how to use XeTeX, which lets you use Mac OS X’s built-in fonts with LaTeX, I figured I’d post my really, really simple results here.

I use a slightly extended version of his example (I use mathspec instead of fontspec) in my drangreport file, but this was the post that got the ball rolling. Custom fonts in LaTeX don’t have to be a world of pain.

excellent example of non-latex looking latex

Tex Live 2013 (2012 is frozen at the end of this month) should have just one typesetting tool — XeTeX. XeTeX outputs directly to pdf in one step, it is by far the easiest tool to support for external products, its usage of unicode and integration with modern fonts would allow the ancient texmf to be dropped entirely, and with a little bit of development platex (japanese character support), could become unnecessary. With just one underlying typesetter to focus on, development of that typesetter would accelerate greatly and many packages would become obsolete, further freeing up time for purposeful TeX development.

When I first read this, I thought it was a knee jerk reaction, and would cause more problems than it solved. But I was still using pdflatex at the time; now I’m using XeTeX, I realise how nice it is to be able to embed any fonts in your document, and I imagine that there are other advantages. Maybe this isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Advanced font selection in XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX.

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This is where to get information about XeTeX, a typesetting system based on a merger of Donald Knuth's TeX system with Unicode and modern font technologies.

TeX amb unicode

To use XeTeX as your engine, you must not use the inputenc package. XeTeX uses utf8 by default, but without said package.

Error 32512 (driver return code) generating output;
file main.pdf may not be valid.

Append '/usr/texbin' to the PATH environment of the child process