[lltx] Font names database

[Elie Roux]

Khaled Hosny a écrit :
> That is an interesting idea, I have a more or less similar idea, but I
> need to think more about it though.
>   

Ok, do not hesitate to share very technical ideas and to describe your 
technical solution, I'm interested in contributing.

> I've considered using fontconfig (actually my first version were using
> fc-list to list all system font files), but I disregarded it later as we
> can't guarantee fontconfig (or fontconfig tools) are present on all
> systems,

That's for sure, but on the systems where it is, it implies that ""all"" 
the fonts are listed by it, except eventually the ones in the TEXMF tree 
that are not always added to the fc database, that's why I liked the 
idea... Also I think the script would take less loading time right? A 
fontforge call for each font seems like a bit overkill to me if there is 
already a database available... Of course we would still have to do it 
manually on poor OSs... Furthermore it would be more compliant with XeTeX.

>  also fontconfig tries to do smart things that wouldn't fit our
> needs and we better off parsing font files ourselves.
>   

I don't understand this... fc-cat (or fc-list -v) displays too much 
information, but we can still parse it, all the work is almost done... 
what doesn't fit it the informations given by fc?

> (BTW, I usually use a recent GNU/Linux distro and never use Windows as a
> production system, so I might actually need Windows help more than any
> thing else.)
>   

Ok, do not hesitate to ask, I have a windows machine available (and a 
virtual one too).

Thank you!
-- 
Elie