On 2010-11-07, Walter wrote: > 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.
This is going to the limits indeed, so there is (currently) no easy, out-of-the-box-for-everyone solution. > 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. If you want to go the "traditional"/pdflatex route, we need to know the error... (actually, a *minimal* document (probably Chinese + English only) that shows the 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. While LyX the LyX GUI and file-format is fully Unicode, the default pdftex engine is not. > A lot of the resources mentioned 'old' font processing techniques > (using fontforge?) no > and the path /usr/share/texmf/fonts/ These are the "LaTeX-fonts" you need with pdftex. > however I found that entering font names from there did not seem to > work, usually, you need to call a LaTeX package that sets these up (e.g. in Document>Settings>LaTeX preamble: \usepackage{libertine}) . > and my distribution's Cyberbit and some other mentioned fonts are > TTF only, installing in to /usr/share/fonts instead. TTF fonts can only be used by XeTeX (or LuaTeX). > 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: This is only for some special fonts for the GUI. > 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. Short answer: display of arbitrary fonts without knowledge of at least some internals is currently not possible. You either need to get to know the tested "historic" (i.e. pre-unicode) way to deal with such a mix of scripts. Or you need to read about using LyX with XeTeX and study the "fontspec" manual to set up your fonts in the LaTeX preamble. Günter
