Hi there, I am a recent convert to LyX, currently using v1.6.5 on Gentoo Linux.
It's been working quite alright, though I now have a need for some pretty heavy duty multilingual text in a single document, specifically at least Burmese, Chinese, Lao, Thai and Vietnamese in addition to English, French and German, and this is causing a huge headache. My problem at present is that if I type Chinese characters in to my document, and the Document > Settings > Language > Encoding options is set to something other than 'Unicode (XeTeX) (utf8)', then attempting to view the document as PDF generates a LaTeX error. Yesterday I spent a fair amount of time going back and forth between the Unicode page (http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/Unicode) and other web CJK / TeX resources trying to solve the problem, but have thus far had no luck. A lot of the resources mentioned 'old' font processing techniques (using fontforge?), and the path /usr/share/texmf/fonts/ however I found that entering font names from there did not seem to work, and my distribution's Cyberbit and some other mentioned fonts are TTF only, installing in to /usr/share/fonts instead. Turning to command line foo, I found that 'lyx -dbg font' told me that the location of fonts being accessed on program startup was in fact /usr/share/lyx/fonts: Setting debug level to font Debugging `font' (Font handling) GuiFontLoader.cpp(209): Adding font /usr/share/lyx/fonts//cmex10.ttf OK GuiFontLoader.cpp(209): Adding font /usr/share/lyx/fonts//cmmi10.ttf OK GuiFontLoader.cpp(209): Adding font /usr/share/lyx/fonts//cmr10.ttf OK GuiFontLoader.cpp(209): Adding font /usr/share/lyx/fonts//cmsy10.ttf OK GuiFontLoader.cpp(209): Adding font /usr/share/lyx/fonts//eufm10.ttf OK GuiFontLoader.cpp(209): Adding font /usr/share/lyx/fonts//msam10.ttf OK GuiFontLoader.cpp(209): Adding font /usr/share/lyx/fonts//msbm10.ttf OK GuiFontLoader.cpp(209): Adding font /usr/share/lyx/fonts//wasy10.ttf OK GuiFontLoader.cpp(209): Adding font /usr/share/lyx/fonts//esint10.ttf OK This would appear to be an entirely different path to the rest of my system, which uses /usr/share/fonts, and an entirely different path to /usr/share/texmf/fonts/ I am appealing for help with getting arbitrary fonts to display (including, if possible, Thai/Lao/Burmese style combining glyphs) in my output as I do not wish or have time to become an expert in the historical inadequacies of font formats, their various commercial restrictions, format conversions, the evolution of TeX or LyX, or the reason why LyX has not yet moved to the otherwise universal default of utf8 for everything. - Walter