[Tex/LaTex] Figuring out Xetex fonts under Debian

debianfontsxetex

I have been trying to start using xelatex.

My configuration:

Debian: testing
Texlive: 2013.20140408-1

Taking the minimal example from

unicode-math and amsmath environments
viz

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{unicode-math}
\setmathfont{XITS Math}
\usepackage{xltxtra}

\begin{document}

\begin{equation}
    α = \beta^2_i + β^2_i
\end{equation}

\end{document}

and running xelatex on it I get:

kpathsea:make_tex: Invalid fontname `XITS Math/ICU', contains ' '

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
! fontspec error: "font-not-found"
!
! The font "XITS Math" cannot be found.
!
! See the fontspec documentation for further information.
!
! For immediate help type H <return>.
!...............................................  

l.4 \setmathfont{XITS Math}

?

With some help from comp.text.tex, I tried replacing the:
\setmathfont{XITS Math} with

\setmathfont{XITS}

\setmathfont{xits-math}

None of this worked until I tried:
\setmathfont{xits-math.otf}

Can you point me someplace where I can study how to specify xetex
fonts under debian?

I was pointed to:
texdocs
which is evidently needed for linux users.
However, the file which I am supposed to copy to /etc:

/var/lib/texmf/fonts/conf/texlive-fontconfig.conf
does not exist on my system.

So, in addition to figuring out how to handle xetex fonts in
debian, my more general question is:

Would you recommend that I dump Debian's texlive and move to a CTAN download?

Best Answer

I'm currently on Debian (testing), where I installed a full TeX Live with

apt-get install texlive-full

From what I can get, it seems that only some fonts are made visible to the system with an entry in /etc/fonts/conf.d

The relevant entries are

/etc/fonts/conf.d/65-fonts-lmodern.conf
/etc/fonts/conf.d/65-fonts-persian.conf
/etc/fonts/conf.d/65-fonts-texgyre.conf

and, indeed, if I try

\setmainfont{Latin Modern Roman}

or

\setmainfont{TeX Gyre Termes}

I get what's expected, because these fonts have been made known to the OS. Unfortunately, probably due to time limitation on the maintainer of TeX Live/Debian (our heroic Norbert Preining), only some font families are registered in /etc/fonts/conf.d

If you install a full vanilla TeX Live from TUG, then the method of adding the provided configuration file to /etc/conf.d should allow you to call all fonts by name. Fonts not made known to the OS must be called by file name, I'm afraid.

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