Today I tried to compile another flyer typeset with LaTeX, but it resulted in the following error:
! pdfTeX error (font expansion): auto expansion is only possible with scalable
fonts.
<to be read again>
\endgroup \set@typeset@protect
The reason for this was lack of scalable TeX Gyre Pagella fonts in my TeX installation (TeXLive 2007 from Debian Sid). When I disabled font expansion (by removing \usepackage[expansion]{microtype} from the document preamble), it tried to make bitmap fonts and failed. So I recalled that the TeX Gyre fonts (much better derivatives of the URW’s 35 standard PostScript fonts, with correct diacritics for many languages) were not available in TeXLive 2007. (With the previous flyer I hadn’t had such problems, since the Concrete Roman fonts are much older and CM-Super scalable fonts are included in Debian.)
Therefore I’ve downloaded them from the GUST site and unpacked the TDS archive into the $HOME/texmf directory. Then I run the mktexlsr $HOME/texmf command for programs in TeXLive to know that new files are available there.
This would be enough for LaTeX packages or METAFONT fonts, but for scalable ones more work is needed. This is since there are many different scalable fonts for one metric one and sometimes bitmap ones are also available and preferred. The files also have many different names, specified in special map files.
Since I do not have any experience with map files in Debian, I used a search engine to find a manual with complete instructions for installing fonts in Debian’s TeXLive. Using this and the next section of this manual I run the following commands to enable TeX Gyre Pagella scalable fonts:
updmap --enable Map qpl.map update-updmap mktexlsr updmap
Then I successfully compiled the flyer with these Palatino-like fonts with correct support for my native language.
