[XeTeX] Finding out if a font supports a particular Unicode character and using it

[Peter Baker]

Chris Jones wrote:
> $ fontforge -version
> Copyright (c) 2000-2008 by George Williams.
>  Executable based on sources from 00:29 GMT 29-Apr-2008.
>  Library based on sources from 20:49 GMT 30-Apr-2008.
> fontforge 20080429
> libfontforge 20080430
>
> But I'm only indexing one font, and the script appears to grab a huge
> chunk of memory at startup: when I did a 'ulimit -v 128000' which should
> be roughly 128 Meg, it borked right at the beginning, not like a memory
> leak that builds up over time.
>
> That's why I was thinking there might be some obscure python option that
> causes this with 2.5 and maybe got fixed with 2.6.
>
>   
But my guess would be you might solve the problem by updating FontForge. 
Apr. 2008 is pretty early in the history of FF Python scripting, and I 
wouldn't be surprised if FF was using memory inefficiently at that time. 
And, as I've said, Python 2.5.2 is working fine for me.

And it would be easier, I suspect, to update FF than Python, which has 
so many dependencies in any Linux system. So that's a place to try.