Excursus

Font management is one are where TeX is really showing its age. Installing fonts in a TeX tree is a daunting task for the uninitiated, to say the least. Doubtless, it would be very different if unicode existed when Donald Knuth wrote TeX.

Fortunately, XeTeX addressed some of these issues. XeTeX is an alternative TeX engine, originally written for OS X but now available on other platforms, that uses your system’s fonts and makes them available for typesetting. Installing new fonts is as simple as installing them on your system. And it knows all about unicode, so non-Roman fonts are no problem. Check out the XeTeX showcase for some impressive examples.

XeTeX’s documentation, while helpful, is still rather sparse. So mission critical information can be hard to fine. The XeTeX mailing list is friendly and helpful. But sometimes you just want to find stuff out for yourself.

Recently, on the XeTeX mailing list, Bruno Voison, posted a useful tip. XeTeX lacks a man page, but to get information about is options, run the following command:

xetex -help

Unlike pdfTeX, XeTeX does not generate PDFs directly; rather, on OS X, it uses the driver xdv2pdf. For a list of options for this driver, run the following command:

xdv2pdf

While xdv2pdf is the standard driver on OS X, a lot of LaTeX functionality can only be had using the alternative driver, xdvipdfmx. One advantage of using xdvipdfmx is that the bookmarks it creates can be read by Preview and any other PDF programs that uses OS X’s PDFkit. Unfortunately, the bookmarks created by xdv2pdf can only be read by Adobe applications. For a list of options for this driver, run the following command:

xdv2pdfmx

For the curious, I am generating XeTeX with the following options:

-output-driver="xdvipdfmx -S -E"

This says use the xdv2pdfmx driver with the -S and -E options. The former produces and encrypted PDF and the later embeds all the fonts.