[tex-live] Comment on libfontconfig

[Jonathan Kew]

On 4 Oct 2006, at 2:29 pm, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:

> Before rushing off to adopt and use libfontconfig, please remember
> that it is not universally available on Unix systems.

True. But I would hazard a guess that it is commonly installed on  
systems used as graphical desktop workstations, running current text-  
and font-rich application software. It may be less likely to be  
present on headless server machines, for instance.

> I just surveyed a couple of dozen different Unix platforms, and found
> that it is available in /usr/lib on these
>
> 	Cygwin on Windows XP	IA-32
> 	GNU/Linux		AMD64, IA-32, IA-64, MIPS, SPARC (Fedora, Gentoo, Red  
> Hat, SuSE)
> 	GNU/Linux		PowerPC (Gentoo Base System version 1.12.4)
> 	Solaris 9 and 10	SPARC and IA-32
>
> and absent from these
>
> 	FreeBSD 5.0 and 6.1	IA-32
> 	GNU/Linux		PowerPC (Yellow Dog Linux release 2.3 (Dayton))
> 	HP-UX			IA-64 and PA-RISC
> 	IRIX 6.5		MIPS
> 	Mac OS X		PowerPC and EM64T
> 	NetBSD 1.6		IA-32
> 	NetBSD 3.0		VAX
> 	OpenBSD	3.5		VAX
> 	OpenBSD	3.9		IA-32
> 	OSF/1 4.0		Alpha
> 	Solaris 7 and 8		SPARC
>
> Given that there are scores of GNU/Linux distributions, there may well
> be others that fail to provide libfontconfig.

It may not be present in a base install, but is available in standard  
packages for many of the above. If the machines are being used as  
typical desktop workstations running Gnome or KDE, with applications  
like Firefox, Adobe Reader, Scribus, AbiWord, Gimp, Inkscape, etc,  
then we can expect libfontconfig to be present. (Aside: in the case  
of Mac OS X, we don't use libfontconfig at all; Apple Type Services  
is used instead, which is always present.)

If I knew how to configure the build so that libfontconfig was "weak- 
linked", so that xetex could run without the library present (and  
test before calling its APIs), then I guess we could have a binary  
that runs without fontconfig; you'd lose the ability to automatically  
find fonts by name in that situation (but then, what would "installed  
fonts" mean in this context?); you could still load them explicitly  
by filename, though, and do Unicode/OpenType typesetting that way.

But at this point I don't know how to do that in the Linux world (or  
these various others), and I don't think it's a high priority.

JK