[tex-live] Fontconfig for XeTeX versus regular fontconfig

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Thu Oct 27 12:33:53 CEST 2011


On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 8:03 PM, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
>    I have to fork my self
>
> I know the feeling.  It's a heavyweight fork, always running out of vm
> when I try it ...

Homeland Security would probable snatch both of you and spirit you off to
Roswell or Nevada and we TL users would be worse off.

>
>  http://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-350003.4.4
>
> No one is forced to use that procedure.  It's there if it helps people.
> If it doesn't help people, don't do it.  If that means they can't use
> the system fonts, well, that's what it means.
>
>    The problem occurs due XeTeX which seems to depend on
>    an on fontconfig to be able to handle its fonts below
>    the TL path, compare with
>
> XeTeX can look up via fontconfig or by filename.  This is ultimately
> chosen by the user's document.  Admittedly system lookups are
> "encouraged" in a number of ways, which I think is highly unfortunate
> and poor practice, but it's not under my control.  I've already made my
> views known to the various maintainer(s).
>
> Anyway, problems with/enhancements for XeTeX should be reported to the
> XeTeX maintainer(s), xetex.sf.net.  It is still Jonathan Kew (hi
> Jonathan), unless and until another capable volunteer comes forward whom
> Jonathan accepts.  I don't see a TL issue here.  Sorry.

In the near term, this is a documentation problem.   I think it is a mistake for
TL to ignore fontconfig as there are times you want to embed TL output in
other documents and then it is important that fonts work the same.  A big part
of TL is font support because OS support has not kept up with the needs, but
that has been improving.   I hope for a day when TL can rely entirely on OS font
support, but that will require things like a way for users who don't
use math fonts to
prune the list of fonts shown in application menus.




-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia



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