Summary:

• XeTeX gives LaTeX access to non-TeX-installed fonts, and fontspec makes it easy.
• XeTeX also lets you write in unicode; biblatex will play nicely if you use biber instead of bibtex as the backend.
• fc-list lists installed fonts (giving the names that XeTeX needs).
• fontforge will display every glyph in the font, nice and big (and you can print the result).
• fontmatrix has a very slick interface for font-browsing, from “tag-this-font” to “inspect-this-glyph”.
• All of these except biblatex and biber (which are still in beta) are packaged for various Linux flavours; biblatex installation is easy, for biber I vaguely recall that I installed via CPAN, which is rather a pain. There may be easier alternatives by now though.

XeTeX lets you use all your fonts in LaTeX

XeTeX is a TeX replacement; you compile your document with xelatex if you’ve been using pdflatex, and nothing much changes apart from that. But behind the scenes quite a lot happens; among other things, you get to use the fontspec package, which works with the font names that the rest of your Linux system knows about. (Another, less positive, feature of the move is that you XeTeX is incompatible with microtype. Can’t have everything…)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Verdana}

If you pick a font with italic and bold alternatives, \textit{} and \textbf{} and so on will just work. Just like that. Which is nice.

If your font has Greek and Russian characters (Greek text characters, not a math alphabet), you can just type ‘em:

Lorem ipsem and so forth; ο ξυπόλητος πρίγκιπας; 
зону большого над, языке а; 
italic: \textit{in Latin και στα Ελληνικά},

Which is nice.

(I don’t know what the Russian says, nor do I remember where I got it. The Greek says “The barefoot prince” and “and in Greek”.)

That Mapping=tex-text says that XeTeX should recognise the old LaTeX style for quotes, long dashes, and so on. But you don’t have to use it: you can type them directly as unicode characters (which is nice).

When he goes---``Hello World!''\\
She replies—“Hello dear!”

And if the font you’re using has fun OpenType features (and that’s the whole point, right?), you can access them easily too:

\fontspec[Ligatures={Common, Rare}]{Impact}
\fontsize{12pt}{18pt}\selectfont Questo è strano assai!
\fontspec[Numbers={OldStyle}]{Impact}Old style: 1234567\\
\fontspec[Numbers={Lining}]{Impact}Lining: 1234567

See the fontspec documentation for much, much more. (If your pdf seems to have half its text missing, there’s something wrong with your pdf rendering library. I don’t remember what I did to fix this though; possibly just updated, or possibly changed to a different pdf viewer.)

biblatex with biber can handle unicode bibliographies

So part of the reason I was originally playing around with all this was to help Olga write documents mixing Greek and Latin characters, with both Greek and Latin in the bibliography, with a minimum of hassle. It turns out that bibtex doesn’t like unicode, in particular it doesn’t know what to do with Greek. But biber, which is being developed as a backend for the biblatex package, is designed for unicode from the ground up. Both biber and biblatex are beta release software and there are still a few kinks to iron out, but they can already do a lot.

List installed fonts with fc-list

If you’re anything like me, the first thing you’re going to want to do once you see how XeTeX and fontspec work is try out lots of fonts to see what you’ve got installed that you could use.

If you just want to know names, fc-list is your friend. Be prepared for a lot of output though…

Here’s a handy trick: use the pgffor package (part of the fantastic graphics package pgf) and you don’t have to constantly retype Lorem ipsem:

\usepackage{pgffor}
...
\foreach \f in {
  Droid Serif,
  Alfios,
  Alexander,
  Dustismo
  ...
  URW Bookman L%
}{
  \noindent\setmainfont{\f}\f:
  Lorem ipsem and so forth.
  \par\medskip
}

Viewing fonts (and individual glyphs) with fontforge and fontmatrix

Somewhere along the line I picked up a free font with heaps of fleurons, and a font of 300 ampersands each by a different designer (yeah, a gimmick, but the proceeds went to charity). For both of these, I wanted a way to see all the glyphs the font contains, large enough to appreciate them as individual characters, and also with the codepoint information so I know how to get access to whichever one I might want to use.

The internet was silent on how to achieve this (or my google-fu was weak), until JanekZ helped me out on typophile. It seems fontforge is the only way to get a conveniently-formatted listing of every glyph the font contains (“Encoding >> Compact”); it can generate a pdf for printing but the pdf doesn’t contain codepoint information. But for simply browsing, fontmatrix is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately it seems to be buggy: “print” doesn’t produce any output, and “view all mapped glyphs” refuses to scroll. But the stuff that works works beautifully.