[tex-live] Comment on libfontconfig

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Wed Oct 4 21:41:21 CEST 2006


Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:

> 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?

No idea.  Google gives lots of manpage hits for "dlopen +BSD", and at
least enough for +HPUX and even +IRIX (usually a particular bad
candidate, isn't it?)  to believe it might be there...

>> 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.

I agree with that.  

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)


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