[XeTeX] Loading fonts from a common server or http URL

[Keith J. Schultz]

Hi Everybody,

The problem is not the OS or "filing system". It is the programs.
	1) If you have a remote server mounted all you need
	     is the mount point plus the path to the file. Standard
	     on all OSes I know.

	2) A program can open any/retrieve any file on a server
	     using http. all it needs to do is speak http!

Technically this is not a problem. 

I believe XeTex et al. should be able to handle 1) without any problems.

2) would require code to be added to retrieve the file, cache it, and access it
add throw it any when done. A waste of bandwidth in my opinion. There are
other cavets to consider.

A better way is to build your own repository and access that. The only sense
the http approach would have is if you have limited storage!

regards
	Keith.


 
Am 22.06.2011 um 09:28 schrieb Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd):

> 
> 
> Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) wrote:
> 
>> It is more a *fontspec* question and may be it has wider scope...
>> Is it possible to load fonts from http URLs?
>> i.e., can I do this:
>> \fontspec{http://www.ctan.org/public/fonts/STIXGeneral.otf}.
> 
> I think it is more of a [Xe]TeX-engine question, to be honest,
> and one that has never really been satisfactorily resolved.
> Because just as you might want to write :
> 
> 	> \fontspec {http://www.ctan.org/public/fonts/STIXGeneral.otf}.
> 
> you might also want to write
> 
> 	\usepackage {http://example.org/LaTeX/Classes/keyval.cls}
> 
> Indeed, anywhere in [La][Xe]TeX [1] that you want to open a file for
> reading (be it font file, source file, data file or whatever),
> it would be nice if that file could be on a remote server and
> fetched using http.
> 
> Unfortunately I am not aware of any implementation of [Xe]TeX
> that supports this; probably the most likely candidate would
> be LuaTeX (Taco cc'd) but I do not think that even LuaTeX
> yet supports this concept.
> 
> Philip Taylor
> --------
> [1] Or indeed, anywhere at all within your PC/Macintosh/Unix box/whatever.
> The problem is not unique to TeX, and it is not at all clear to me
> why filing systems have not yet evolved to allow remote http-served
> files to be read-accessed using the same interface as local files.
> 
> 
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