[luatex] luaotfload problems (MiKTeX/Windows 7)

Jura Pintar pintar at post.harvard.edu
Tue Jul 2 22:34:37 CEST 2013


Dear all,

After thinking about it a bit, I see that there are two different 
problems with luaotfload on my machine.

First, it seems to hang on particular paths that might have something 
weird going on with them; this isn't such a big deal, as long as we 
avoid putting our working directories in odd places.

Second, and this is a bigger problem, when using MiKTeX (x64), the 
location of the cache is not properly resolved (i.e. luaotfload tries 
using the undefined $TEXMFCACHE, instead of trying $TEXMFVAR, and the 
database ends up in the working folder). This, naturally, isn't a 
problem with TeX Live, and since I have the two distributions installed 
in parallel, I can confirm that everything works with it (so presumably 
the problem is not due to some peculiarity of my system).

When the code

local cachepaths=kpse.expand_var('$TEXMFCACHE') or ""
   if cachepaths=="" then
cachepaths=kpse.expand_var('$TEXMFVAR') or ""
   end
if cachepaths=="" then
   cachepaths=kpse.expand_var('$VARTEXMF') or ""
end
if cachepaths=="" then
   cachepaths="."
end

in luaotfload-merged.lua and/or luaotfload-basics-gen.lua is replaced 
with the legacy code

   local cachepaths
   if kpse.expand_var('$TEXMFCACHE')~='$TEXMFCACHE' then
     cachepaths=kpse.expand_var('$TEXMFCACHE')
   elseif kpse.expand_var('$TEXMFVAR')~='$TEXMFVAR' then
     cachepaths=kpse.expand_var('$TEXMFVAR')
   end
   if not cachepaths then
     cachepaths="."
   end

the problem is resolved, and the database is generated and correctly 
placed in the directory determined by $TEXMFVAR.

I haven't much experience at all with Lua so I'm not sure what exactly 
is going on here. I get the legacy code, and why it gets us the right 
result (because $TEXMFCACHE expands to $TEXMFCACHE when it is undefined 
- like under MiKTeX), but I don't quite get the syntax with 'or' in the 
newer code. Do people (esp. Philipp, of course) have an idea why this is 
happening?

Best,

Jura


P.S. On an unrelated note, I've noticed that the compilation time with 
LuaLaTeX under MiKTeX x64 (with all the latest updates) is considerably 
greater than the compilation of the same files under TeX Live (more than 
three times as long for some files, in fact). What might be the reason 
for that?


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