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Haha I spent so long 3 weeks ago finding a font that would work on XeLaTeX to generate business documents programmatically not a fun endeavor. Yak-shaving at i

Haha I spent so long 3 weeks ago finding a font that would work on XeLaTeX to generate business documents programmatically not a fun endeavor. Yak-shaving at its best (worst?)

cratermoon 3y ago
Really? Should work with any OpenType font. Are you generating in a language that doesn't use roman-ish alphabet? You're not wrong that working with TeX can involve a lot of yak shaving in general. Sometimes finding the right template can solve a lot of problems. I use Eisvogel. https://github.com/Wandmalfarbe/pandoc-latex-template https://github.com/Wandmalfarbe/pandoc-latex-template
- arthurcolle 3y ago
  No this was in English but I needed the math characters, like for example, ≥ I ended up settling on Latin Roman Math (something like that). I needed to use pandoc to convert Markdown files generated dynamically into a PDF that looked reasonably OK. It wasn't great to have to use the Latin Roman * fonts to begin with given audience but at least I found something. Thanks for linking that I'll take a look :)
  - svat 3y ago
    Obviously to use a character you need some font containing that character — this is not specific to XeTeX; it's just that in many other programs this “font fallback” happens silently behind the scenes (will pick up a random font from your system containing that character), while with a typesetting system you need to be more explicit. I wrote a bit about that here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/377729 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/377729
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      The key is that while many fonts have representations for Unicode math points, math symbols and math display are their own things, and typesetting them is not the same as typesetting text. As with musical notation, math typesetting has its own requirements and rules. Knuth created TeX as a way to typeset complex mathematical formulae. TeX has math mode, a completely separate environment. There's more to typesetting it than choosing a font that has the desired symbols.

Haha I spent so long 3 weeks ago finding a font that would work on XeLaTeX to generate business documents programmatically not a fun endeavor. Yak-shaving at its best (worst?)

cratermoon 3y ago

Really? Should work with any OpenType font. Are you generating in a language that doesn't use roman-ish alphabet? You're not wrong that working with TeX can involve a lot of yak shaving in general. Sometimes finding the right template can solve a lot of problems. I use Eisvogel. https://github.com/Wandmalfarbe/pandoc-latex-template https://github.com/Wandmalfarbe/pandoc-latex-template

arthurcolle 3y ago
No this was in English but I needed the math characters, like for example, ≥ I ended up settling on Latin Roman Math (something like that). I needed to use pandoc to convert Markdown files generated dynamically into a PDF that looked reasonably OK. It wasn't great to have to use the Latin Roman * fonts to begin with given audience but at least I found something. Thanks for linking that I'll take a look :)
- svat 3y ago
  Obviously to use a character you need some font containing that character — this is not specific to XeTeX; it's just that in many other programs this “font fallback” happens silently behind the scenes (will pick up a random font from your system containing that character), while with a typesetting system you need to be more explicit. I wrote a bit about that here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/377729 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/377729
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    The key is that while many fonts have representations for Unicode math points, math symbols and math display are their own things, and typesetting them is not the same as typesetting text. As with musical notation, math typesetting has its own requirements and rules. Knuth created TeX as a way to typeset complex mathematical formulae. TeX has math mode, a completely separate environment. There's more to typesetting it than choosing a font that has the desired symbols.