[lltx] Can luatex auto-run mkluatexfontdb ?

[Will Robertson]

On 16/05/2010, at 7:17 PM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:

> Le 16/05/2010 11:20, Will Robertson a écrit :
>> I'm thinking about the workflow that users will need to follow when
>> installing new system fonts for LuaLaTeX. In XeTeX, if a font is not found
>> then the font cache is refreshed to see if there have been new fonts
>> installed.
> 
> Interesting. As a XeTeX user, I wasn't even aware of that :-) So, you never need
> to run fc-cache manually?

Ah, no. Sorry for the confusion.
This is only true on Mac OS X, when it uses system calls and manages its own font cache.
AFAIK, fc-cache is manually required under Linux/Windows.


>> This is far friendly than having to run mkluatexfontdb, even if it
>> has a button in tlmgr. But am I right in thinking that this won't be possible
>> for security reasons? (A la shell escape.)
>> 
> Basically, yes. But, as you may know, we're finally releasing the "restricted
> shell-escape" feature in TL10. AFAIK, the list of authorised programs is not
> fixed yet, but if it can include fc-list, then mkluatexfontsdb could be invoked
> directly from LuaTeX (not using os.system(), but using it directly since it is
> lua code).

That's what I had in mind. What do you think?
It slows down compilation very slightly when you mis-type a font name, but the convenience is worth it, in my opinion.


> Somehow unrelated: I just realised mkluatexfontsdb uses io.popen(). Last time I
> checked, this function was not working on windows. Did anyone test luaotfload on
> windows?

Sorry, don't have a Windows box :(

-- Will