[tex-live] Fontconfig for XeTeX versus regular fontconfig

[Dr. Werner Fink]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 03:51:26PM +0200, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
> Am Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:36:46 GMT schrieb Karl Berry:
> 
> >     why are both opentype and truetype copies of gnu-
> >     freefont shipped with texlive?
>  
> > You don't say what fonts you're talking about.  Anyway, in general,
> > there's no reason to suppose OTF and TTF versions are identical.
> 
> The problem exists in various variants also on miktex.
> xetex/xdvipdfmx got confused because of different versions of an
> otf-font in system/texmf, because of otf + ttf versions, even
> because of otf + type1 versions. 
> 
> > The right answer here is to fix XeTeX.
> 
> Yes, it would be really useful if the communication between xetex
> and xdvipdfmx could be improved in this respect - or at least if
> they would search fonts in the same way. And if one could tell
> xetex/xdvipdfmx to prefer e.g. otf- over ttf-fonts.  

Reading the source code of web2c/xetexdir/XeTeXFontMgr_FC.cpp for
xetex and xdvipdfmx/src/fontmap.c and a short comparision by testing
leads me to the conclusion that XeTeXFontMgr_FC.cpp should be
redesigned.  This because it reads in *all* fonts (very slow)
and holds it in its own memory based cache ... whereas fontmap.c
simply uses the search options for font patterns to load *one*
font at the time it is required.

      Werner

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