Hi Alan,
Is there a way to check whether a font is present in a user's system? I need to generate a document with Myriad Pro if it exists, Arial otherwise, and if neither, exit with an error.
Myriad Pro is nothing like Arial, though... but just to make your life worse: thought about version numbers? There are many versions of Myriad Pro, and many versions of Arial. How do you know which version numbers are permissible?
But let's step back for a moment because there's a fundamental problem with your question: if you're using TeX, you're implicitly saying you care deeply about the typesetting of your document, which includes being particular about which stretches of text use what font. Not just "which various fonts look good for this text", but "which font is the one I intend to use for this bit of my document". Rather than testing for several fonts on a user's machine, and picking "the best match", like if the content were styled via (X)HTML+CSS, with a font rule that specifies various fonts with fallbals, part of the power of TeX is the fact that it will always look the same on any machine it's compiled on, provided the dependencies are met. So, either your document will look the same no matter what machine it's compiled on, or it doesn't compile. The idea that it will compile with Myriad Pro on one machine, and Arial on another, basically violates the very idea of TeX.
The better way to solve whatever problem you're having that made you wonder how to detect certain fonts is to simply supply those fonts along with your .tex source. If other people need to compile your source, simply ensure that they have everything they need to compile it?
- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans nihongoresources.com -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
