[lltx] Can luatex auto-run mkluatexfontdb ?

[Khaled Hosny]

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 06:50:41PM +0930, Will Robertson wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 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. 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.)

We don't need to run the script, almost all the code is part of
luaotfload itself, the script is just a command line interface to it. It
is doable, basically we can do the following:
* in names.load() if no names database found, generate one.
* in names.resolve() if font not found and no corresponding tfm file,
  then update the database and look again.

The code was written with this in mind, though I didn't manage to
actually implement it, may be now is good time to try.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer