[tex-live] xe(la)ex and font searching delay

Siep Kroonenberg siepo at cybercomm.nl
Thu Mar 2 14:40:02 CET 2017


On Thu, Mar 02, 2017 at 02:28:12PM +0100, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
> 
> Since some time I observe a problem with xelatex and its font
> search.   
> 
> Today I had a quite extreme example. xelatex hanged so long when
> loading size10.clo (where in the newest format the latin modern open
> type fonts are loaded) that I at first thought there were a loop
> somewhere. 
> 
> The delay could be seen in miktex, in texlive 2014 (in this case
> with a document) and texlive 2016. But miktex and texlive 2014
> behaved again after I waited long enough so that the compilation
> succeded. 
> 
> With texlive 2016 the only thing that helps is to call 
>   fc-cache -f 
> 
> Imho the only thing I did that could be font related was to install
> a few .ttf fonts in a local texmf tree to try out an example on
> tex.sx. 
> 
> My impression is that xelatex realizes that the fonts have changes
> and triggers the recreation of the cache but that the cache is then
> not correctly stored and so is recreated at every compilation until
> a manual fc-cache -f corrects the situation.
> 
> I'm on windows 10 and installed texlive in my normal user account. 

That is a known problem. When xetex tries to refresh the font cache
it fails to overwite the old version with the new version,
apparently because Windows locks the old version for no good reason.

This is a well-known Windows problem, which also occurs in other
situations.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg


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