MinionPro on Mac OS X

By far the easiest way to use the wonderful Minion Pro font (installed on my Mac via Adobe CS4) is with XeTeX as ShreevatsaR suggests.

e.g.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\setromanfont{Minion Pro}

\begin{document}

This can then be compiled with xelatex on the command line, or using the proper setting in TeXShop.

If you prefer to use pdftex then you must install the font in a format that TeX can read (only XeTeX can read the true type font used by modern system software). This in my experience is a bit of a pain, but is described here: http://www.tug.org/mactex/fonts/fonttutorial-current.html


Hugo, you say "I do have Minion Pro installed in my system -- although I honestly don't know how, but I suppose it either came with Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Office", however before you can use the Minion Pro OTF fonts on your system, they first need to be converted into Type1 format. I'm guessing you haven't done this yet (please correct me if I'm wrong). The MinionPro README on CTAN contains the exact instructions you'll need to step through to convert your otf files to pfb, where to place them in your texmf, how to install them, etc. Assuming you've already installed the MinionPro package, the font and map files properly on your system, the main things you'll need to do are:

  1. create a temporary directory
  2. install LCDF Typetools into it (download these from www.lcdf.org/type)
  3. install convert.sh into it (contained in scripts.zip at CTAN, although you probably have downloaded this already)
  4. make a directory under it called otf and copy your Minion Pro otf files there
  5. run convert.sh (this creates a directory called pfb containing your Type1 fonts)
  6. copy your new pfb files into the appropriate place in your texmf
  7. texhash and updmap or their equivalents on your system (see the README)

The number of steps might appear onerous compared to usual one-click package installations, but they're really not too difficult. Just follow them quite precisely and you'll be right. You'll be rewarded with a very handsome dual-purpose text and math typeface, with the added bonus of the equally handsome and quite complete MnSymbol symbols set at the end.


I had prepared a certain important document (a couple of hundred pages) using the MinionPro font a few months back, and I am required to make critical edits to it now. My compile failed today because my current computer, which is a Mac, did not have the MinionPro LaTeX package installed. Googling led me to this page and a couple of others, and thanks to these, I was able to make MinionPro available to pdflatex on my Mac without breaking much of a sweat. Here are the exact steps which I followed, in the hope that they may be useful to someone else in the same predicament. They are based on the MinionPro README.

This set of steps installs the font into a folder in the user's home directory, so these may be useful if you are averse to modifying files in system (i.e, non-home) directories. Also, if you are confused as to which updmap.cfg to edit (there seem to be at least four on my system), then you can try seeing if step 11 below is of use.

  1. Find the Minion Pro font (otf) files on the Mac. These are hidden in the Adobe Reader application image (is that the right word?). Go to Finder -> Applications, open the context menu for "Adobe Reader" (two-click on it), and select "Show package contents". This will mount the image file. The otf files are now available as /Applications/Adobe Reader.app/Contents/Resources/Resource/Font/MinionPro*.otf

  2. The otfinfo command mentioned in the README was already available in my system, so I presumed that LCDF Typetools were already installed (perhaps as part of TexLive?). I ran $ otfinfo -v /Applications/Adobe\ Reader.app/Contents/Resources/Resource/Font/MinionPro-Bold.otf
    and got
    Version 2.103;PS 2.000;hotconv 1.0.67;makeotf.lib2.5.29150

  3. As per the README, this means that my font version is 002.000. Also, I have only the base weights, and so I downloaded the following files:

    scripts.zip
    metrics-base.zip
    enc-2.000.zip

  4. My TEXMFLOCAL (as found out using kpsexpand '$TEXMFLOCAL') is outside my home directory (somewhere in /usr/local/...), and so I decided to install the new font into my TEXMFHOME, which is ~/Library/texmf. This directory did not exist, so I created it.

  5. I did Step 1 of the README ...

    $ mkdir /tmp/MinionPro
    $ cd /tmp/MinionPro
    $ unzip ~/Downloads/scripts.zip

  6. ... and then Step 2:

    $ cp /Applications/Adobe\ Reader.app/Contents/Resources/Resource/Font/Minion*otf otf/

  7. And Step 3:

    $ ./convert.sh

  8. Then Step 4:

    $ mkdir -p ~/Library/texmf/fonts/type1/adobe/MinionPro
    $ cp pfb/*.pfb ~/Library/texmf/fonts/type1/adobe/MinionPro

  9. Step 5:

    $ cd ~/Library/texmf/
    $ unzip ~/Downloads/metrics-base.zip
    $ unzip ~/Downloads/enc-2.000.zip

  10. Instead of the remaining steps in the README (which looked scary), I did the following as advised by a discussion on comp.tex.macosx :

    $ updmap --enable Map=MinionPro.map

This gave a few lines of output which seemed to indicate that The Right ThingTM was being done, and after this I was able to compile my document using pdflatex as usual.

EDIT: I also came across the issues described here, here and here, and solved them by editing a couple of text files as described in the respective answers.

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