[lltx] mkluatexfontdb: Bug and documentation issue

[Dieter Köhler]

Hi all,

I had encountered a crash of mkluatexfontdb on indexing a certain font 
und could solve the problem with the help of the "luatex" mailinglist. 
Since some more details might be of interest especially to the 
developers I sent a detailed bug report to this mailinglist.

I am using mkluatexfontdb version 1.07, database version 2.009 in an 
up-to-date MiKTeX 2.9 installation under Windows Vista.  Attempting to 
create the database resulted in an app crash.

Using the -v option I discovered that this was caused by a font named 
"orlando.ttf".  I cannot provide you with the font itself, because I do 
not know, whether it is free or not.  Its version timestamp is 
"1994-09-27 15:35:31".  Perhaps this helps you to obtain it from somewhere.

When trying to add the font to the blacklist, I discovered some typos 
and unclarities in the luaotfload package documentation (2012/03/27 
v1.26) in section 3.1:

- The first sentence of the second paragraph is somehow corrupted: "and 
added the to be blacklisted files, one per line." should read something 
like: "and add the problematic font files to the blacklist, one per line."

- "... create a file named otfl-blacklist.cnf ... Then put the file some 
where kpse can find." is very cryptic for me as a luatex beginner, 
because no explanation is given, what "kpse" means and where it 
typically looks for the file. After a while, I discovered that there was 
already a otfl-blacklist.cnf in the "tex/luatex/luaotfload" subdirectory 
of my MiKTeX installation.  Perhaps this should be mentioned here.

- I also discovered that I need to normalize the entries in the 
otfl-blacklist.cnf file in order to function properly:  The casing had 
to be normalized to all lower-case and the slashes in the paths to 
forward-slashes.  The latter is perhaps not so uncommen, but I am not 
sure whether the former is a bug or a feature.  However, I think both 
peculiarities should be mentioned in the documentation to make it easy 
for beginners to set up their luatex system.

Happy coding!

Dieter Köhler