XeTeX

Today, I had the strange experience of rendering a LaTeX source producing a pdf with a perfect verdana font. Simply by including some lines in the header of the source (“preamble”), then invoking xelatex.After struggling with fonts in TeX for years, it seems like a miracle that the mere invocation of a font’s name “just works” (I still have to research equation fonts, another long-standing issue). But the XeTeX project is more ambitious, since it aims to join unicode and TeX, thus providing a professional typesetting solution for characters such as Chinese, Japanese, Georgian, Arabic, Hebrew…

This is the code I had produced in verdana. Just two lines of code changed! Notice also the document class is not quite standard, being the exam class (nice for tests and exams).

\documentclass[12pt]{exam}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Verdana}

\boxedpoints
\pointpoints{}{}

%\newcommand{\sen}{\operatorname{\sen}}

\begin{document}

etc

This is the first link when searching “tetex” in google images. Beautiful example, with source partly in Tamil, and a resulting pdf in perfect (I guess) Tamil style. The beauty stands in sharp contrast with the stupid (and only) comment on the blog’s entry.