[Tex/LaTex] How to use an OpenType font with the LaTeX document

fontsopentypexetex

I want to use a really cool open-source OpenType font with my LaTeX document.

I was told that either I could go through a long process of converting the OpenType font to one useable by LaTeX, or I should instead switch to using XeTeX.

Is there a way for me to use an unmodified OpenType font with my LaTeX document (and existing LaTeX installation)?

Best Answer

Switch to XeTeX:

Change your invocations of pdflatex to xelatex.
\usepackage{xltxtra} at the beginning of your preamble (some XeTeX goodies, in particular it also loads fontspec, which is needed for font selection).
\setmainfont{Name of OTF font} in the preamble.
No step 4.

It’s as easy as that.

Drawback: you lose the advantages of the microtype package. Ah, and be sure to use UTF-8 as your source encoding, and remove any \usepackage{inputenc} declarations.

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[Tex/LaTex] Problems with opentype options under XeTeX

First, a font does not necessarily support all types of ligatures. Linux Libertine supports only (checked here) Ligatures={Common,Rare,Discretionary}.

The OpenType variant of Linux Libertine shipped with media-fonts/libertine-ttf works on an up-to-date Gentoo with TeX Live 2011. Another option is to install the dev-texlive/texlive-fontsextra package, which also contains the font. To use it and to be able to select it by name, run this command after installation:

eselect fontconfig enable 09-texlive.conf

This will allow all programs to access fonts installed in the TeX Live texmf tree.

Then this code will work as expected:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text,Ligatures={Common,Rare,Discretionary}]{Linux Libertine O}

\begin{document}

Hello World

\end{document}

Note: This was tested on TeX Live 2011. Gentoo has TeX Live 2010 as the stable version. If you keep experiencing problems, try upgrading to the newer version of TeX Live.

[Tex/LaTex] OpenType Latex font for usage in text editor

The layout of the characters in classic TeX fonts is somewhat eccentric (For example capital Greek gamma is in position 0 in the Roman font. Thus it is not automatic (to say the least) that typing any non-ASCII character in a text editor will directly produce the same character when typeset by TeX.

If you use utf8 encoding

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Or use xelatex or lualatex (which are natively utf-8 based Unicode systems) and you use OpenType versions of fonts such as the latin modern collection then you are in a better position to see similar characters. For mathematics though you probably would want unicode-math (which only works with lualetex or xelatex).

Perhaps you need to be more specific about the TeX variants and Editors and kind of input you want.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Problems with opentype options under XeTeX

[Tex/LaTex] OpenType Latex font for usage in text editor

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