[Tex/LaTex] Texlive 2019xetex fatal error: xdvipdfmx:fatal: Unable to find TFM file “cmssbx8”

tex-core

Yesterday, i.e. a few days after announcement of the release of TeXLive 2019 I downloaded it and installed on my computer and a portable version on my pendrive. And uninstalled TeXLive 2017 version from my computer. Fortunately, I left TexLive 2018 version on my tablet. As an interface and editor I use TeXStudio. To my dismay, the TeX program with my book (at the moment 278 pages) which compiled smoothly using XeLaTeX from TeXLive 2017 and 2018 stopped being compiled using XeTeX from TeXLive 2019 installed on my computer as well as on the pendrive. The message I get from the both reads:

xdvipdfmx:fatal: Unable to find TFM file "cmssbx8". No output PDF file written.
fwrite: Broken pipe xelatex.exe:

Anybody can help to identify a reason? Or anybody has experienced a similar problem?
As far as I know, there is no font like "cmssbx8" and it should be replaced by "cmssbx8.pfb" from sansmathfonts package.
As I use a lot of different packages it is difficult to provide all the details of the tex program. For this reason I would like to mention the following packages related to fonts I use in my program:

\usepackage{amsmath,amstext,amssymb,amsthm}
\usepackage[psamsfonts,mathscr]{eucal}
\usepackage{helvet}
\usepackage{sansmathfonts}
\usepackage{pifont}
\usepackage[no-math]{fontspec}

\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{\sfdefault}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}

Thank you in advance
Zbigniew

Best Answer

The error message is about a tfm, not a pfb.

tfm are often created on the fly (when the font has been orginally made with metafont) but this can sometimes fail.

Try to compile with pdflatex (not xelatex) 

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document} 
\font\test=cmssbx8 \test abc 
\end{document}

This will hopefully trigger the creation of the tfm and then xelatex will be able to find it too.

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