[tex-live] Comment on libfontconfig

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Wed Oct 4 19:17:44 CEST 2006


On 4 Oct 2006, at 5:21 pm, Frank Küster wrote:

> Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> I thinkt the solution is dlopen(3) on Linux.

Ah, but is that going to be available/compatible on all those other  
systems as well, or does it introduce a new area of complexity and  
system dependence, requiring careful configure usage and conditional  
code?

> Just in case you didn't
> know the keyword; I don't know much more than that: It allows loading
> and accessing libraries at runtime, with the possibility to check for
> success without getting weird user errors.

Thanks; I've heard of it but never looked into it. If I have a  
chance, I'll take a look -- but as I've indicated in other responses,  
I don't feel that systems without fontconfig are likely to be the  
primary users of xetex, so if our xetex and xdvipdfmx binaries won't  
run on such a system, I can live with that.

JK



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