[tex-live] Symlinks to fonts during installation

[Zdenek Wagner]

2013/8/28 Pander <pander at users.sourceforge.net>:
> Hi all,
>
> I would liek to propose that when onse chooses to create symlinks during
> installation that
>   /usr/local/share/fonts/truetype ->
> ../../texlive/2013/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/
> and
>   /usr/local/share/fonts/opentype ->
> ../../texlive/2013/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/
> are being created.
>
> In this way, systems such as Ubuntu can directly access the fonts
> without any further configuration. This is an identical approach as is
> done now for the files that end up in /usr/share/bin. When needed also
> absolute path can be used.
>
You still have to use fc-cache or wait until fontconfig updates the
cache itself. Instead of linking the font directories I create this
symlink:

/etc/fonts/conf.d/09-texlive.conf ->
/usr/local/texlive/current/texmf-var/fonts/conf/texlive-fontconfig.conf

On my computer /usr/local/texlive/current is a symlink to the current
TL. So when I decided that 2013 is debugged, i removed the symlink to
2012 and created the symlink to 2013.

> What is the opinion of the TeX Live maintainers on this?
>
It may be a dangerous weapon. For instance, some Linux distributions
come with an old version of GNU FreeFont. As I found, fontconfig for
some reasones sometimes obeys the search order given in the config
files, sometimes not. You should be very careful before creating such
links. It took me a long time to find and fix font problems that used
to appear and disappear according to fontconfig's mood.

> Regards,
>
> Pander
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz