[tex-live] inclusion of libraries

[Frank Küster]

Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:

>> I have just looked on an IRIX box (Irix 6.5), and it doesn't seem to
>> have it.  At least the search tool looked on the whole disk and didn't
>> find it.
>
> Does this mean that a typical IRIX system (with whatever graphical  
> interface and desktop manager is used there) uses a different way of  
> managing/locating fonts? If so, the most appropriate thing to do is  
> probably to create an alternative implementation of the XeTeXFontMgr  
> module that is used to locate fonts on the host platform.
>
> Or does it mean that the IRIX box in question was not configured as a  
> desktop workstation with GUI software, OpenType and TrueType fonts,  
> etc. but as some other kind of setup? 

Hm, I fear this was a typical system.  We don't have sophisticated IRIX
admins who would tune it "down".  On the contrary, we only have the
machine because years ago, this was the only hardware providing hardware
stereo (for viewing macromolecular structures), or rather the hardware
of choice of the most commonly used software for doing that.  And the
currently responsible person wants to replace them by Linux boxes with
modern hardware stereo, I think they're already ordered.

I have no idea how fonts are handled; it might well be that IRIX doesn't
have any special support for font management; 6.5 has been released in
1998, and the maintainence releases since then seem to be mainly
bugfixes.

> It's perfectly possible to run  
> a Linux box without fontconfig, too -- but XeTeX is probably less  
> relevant on such setups, so maybe we should not try to target them  
> for now.

As Martin pointed out, fontconfig is available for IRIX in their
"freeware" package repository, so anybody who wants it can have it.  But
it's not installed by default, it seems.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)