I've hit the wall with trying to get new fonts working in LaTeX and/or ConTeXt. I spent the better part of last weekend, and more time tonight, futilely reading, studying, experimenting, trying, and only ending up frustrated.
Several times I've felt I was close. Tantalizingly close. Then that feeling of closeness seems to rapidly race away leaving me stuck in some new fashion.
I've purchased the Bembo Std, Minion Pro, and Poetica Std fonts from the Adobe Store. All the fonts came in .OTF format:
powerbook:/Library/Fonts michael$ ls -lh *.otf | cut -c 30-
43K 17 Aug 20:13 BemboStd-Bold.otf
46K 17 Aug 20:13 BemboStd-BoldItalic.otf
46K 17 Aug 20:13 BemboStd-Italic.otf
61K 17 Aug 20:13 BemboStd.otf
205K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-Bold.otf
244K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-BoldIt.otf
244K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-It.otf
202K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-Medium.otf
243K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-MediumIt.otf
200K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-Regular.otf
204K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-Semibold.otf
244K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-SemiboldIt.otf
418K 21 Aug 23:31 PoeticaStd.otf
I suppose I should enumerate the various methods I've tried and what seemed to work, and what didn't (version conflicts, dependencies, cryptic errors, ...) but I'm too frustrated right now. I'd love to have some utility that I could run that would just execute all the necessary voodoo & black magic to get a working LaTeX and/or ConTeXt environment with my new fonts. (Several seem to go part of the distance and then stop with some hand waving of "and then you just need to do x, y and z" which means trying to hunt down how to do x, y & z.)
I mean the documents I want to work with have little more than characters you can find on any keyboard. I'm not trying to do anything fancy or exotic. No math even!
Sigh. I think I am going to delete my teTeX installation (installed via fink) and just start fresh. I'll probably look at building teTeX from source because at times it seems that the various tools (texhash, updmap, updmap-sys, etc.) don't know, care, or pay any attention to /sw/etc/texmf.local.)
The twenty-five different .pdf manuals, guides, tutorials I've downloaded and scoured... I may delete them too. I'm sure I can find them again with Google. Hopefully this time I can chase down the right path.
I'm taking tomorrow off. It's the first day of school, and I really hope by the time the kids get home from school I'll have made some substantive progress.
—Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, August 23, 2005 at 20:44