[XeTeX] how does xetex choose fonts?

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Wed Mar 12 23:38:00 CET 2014


2014-03-12 23:05 GMT+01:00 François Patte <francois.patte at mi.parisdescartes.fr>:
> Bonsoir,
>
>
> I installed the "last" version of Freefonts on my texlive-2013 in:
>
> /opt/texlive/texmf-local/fonts/opentype/public/gnu-freefont/
>
> In order to be sure that xelatex will pick up this version, I changed
> the permissions of other directories containing other versions of these
> fonts to 000. So I change the permissions of:
>
> /opt/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public/gnu-freefont/
> /opt/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/gnu-freefont/
> /usr/share/fonts/opentype/freefonts/
> /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefonts/
>
> But if I change back the permisions of these directories to 755, xelatex
> chooses the old version in them.
>
> Is there a process to choose fonts? Something like unix system: 1)
> user's account 2) "local" config (/usr/local/... /opt/... 3) installed
> system?
>
> I ope to be clear enough.
>
As Khaled Hosny explained, in unix systems XeTeX uses what fontconfig
offers. I have read fontconfig documentation and added a configuration
file to my /etc//fonts/conf.d directory with higher priority so that
fontconfig should find the FreeFont fonts added by me, not FreeFont
from TeX Live. I did it exactly in te same way on my home computer and
on my work computer. At that time I used Fedora 13 od both. It worked
fine on my home computer but did not work on my work computer. Thus I
forcibly uninstalled TL's FreeFont from my work computer and kept it
on my home computer. A few weeks ago the same problem appeared om my
home computer although I have not updated TeX Live within these few
weeks. It seems that under some unpredictable circumstances fontconfig
does not obey the preferences set in the configuration file, thus the
best solution is to make sure, that fontconfig can find only one
instance of the font.

The system fonts have always the highest priority. It could be changed
only by editing /etc/fonts/fonts.conf but system update may overwirte
such changes. The system FreeFont must be deleted and it is necessary
to be careful because due to package dependencies some update can
reinstall the fonts. It really happened on my notebook and I took me
some time to find why things ceased to work.

> Thanks for attention.
>
> --
> François Patte
> UFR de mathématiques et informatique
> Laboratoire CNRS MAP5, UMR 8145
> Université Paris Descartes
> 45, rue des Saints Pères
> F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
> Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
> http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz




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