LaTeX Font Configuration (Ubuntu/Debian Linux)

Section 40.4 LaTeX Font Configuration (Ubuntu/Debian Linux)

Actual font installation is missing here, since I (RAB) cannot recall just when or how certain fonts arrived on my system. Certainly they were almost all via Ubuntu/Debian packages, though they could have been specific to TeXLive. Specifically, the texlive-fonts-recommended and texlive-fonts-extra are two packages that will make many fonts available to TeX/LaTeX on an Ubuntu/Debian system. The following is offered in the hope that it will be useful to other publishers on other Unix-like systems.

There is a system directory

/etc/fonts/conf.d

with a wide variety of configuration files for various fonts, or collections of fonts. Here I find files (symlinks, really)

65-fonts-lmodern.conf
65-fonts-texgyre.conf

The first points to the extensive Latin Modern fonts, which are an improved version of the original Computer Modern fonts, and are PreTeXt’s default font for out-of-the-box LaTeX. We have never had a report of these not being available in an author’s TeX distribution. The file indicates that the fonts can be found at

/usr/share/texmf/fonts/opentype/public/lm
/usr/share/texmf/fonts/opentype/public/lm-math

The second configuration file points to multiple fonts from the TeX Gyre Collection

www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/

of GUST: Polska Grupa Użytkowników Systemu TeX. Examining the file indicates these fonts can be found at:

/usr/share/texmf/fonts/opentype/public/tex-gyre
/usr/share/texmf/fonts/opentype/public/tex-gyre-math

As of 2019-11-09 these were the only TeX fonts known to my system in OTF format. This despite having directories full of fonts at:

/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype

and more. You might have similar directories with the year of your version of TeXLive as a directory. The solution is to create a new file (as root) named

/etc/fonts/conf.d/09-texlive-fontconfig.conf

with contents

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <dir>/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype</dir>
  <dir>/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype</dir>
</fontconfig>

and then running fc-cache -f -v to update what fonts are known to the system. It is possible that you can put this file somewhere in your home directory if you do not have administrative access, but we have not tested that approach. Note that some versions of the above file that you might find online will include a type1 directory. It is best to not include this directory, since these fonts are best used only with pdflatex and if known to the system they can mistakenly be incorporated by xelatex, with disasterous results. Typically you will get an unusable PDF and your xelatex run will have the error message

xdvipdfmx:fatal: pdf_ref_obj(): passed invalid object

near the very end of the command-line output.

Apparently, the texlive-fontconfig.conf file is not distributed with Debian Linux as this search

packages.debian.org/search?arch=any&mode=filename&searchon=contents&keywords=fontconfig.conf

will demonstrate. Please report any change in this situation.

When installing the Open Dyslexic font via an Ubuntu package (2020-04-28), xelatex became confused by the presence of Web Open Font Format (WOFF) versions which were installed along with the OTF versions. The solution is to create a new file (as root) named

/etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-woff.conf

with contents

<fontconfig>
  <selectfont>
    <rejectfont>
      <glob>/usr/share/fonts/woff/*</glob>
    </rejectfont>
  </selectfont>
</fontconfig>

and then running fc-cache -f -v to update what fonts are known to the system. See the tex.stackexchange.com

tex.stackexchange.com/questions/392144

post.

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