[tex-live] xelatex on OpenBSD sparc64 - Bus Error

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Sun Jun 24 00:03:04 CEST 2007


On 23 Jun 2007, at 10:10 pm, Edd Barrett wrote:

> I also tryed downloading and using several fonts from the web and
> using them with varying success. It could be due to the quality of the
> font itself however, rather than the binaries.
>
> For example SquareTextTryout (http://fontfreak.com/fonts-s3.htm) does
> this on i386:
> <snip>
> [1] (./test.aux) )
> (see the transcript file for additional information)
>
> ** NOTICE: This document contains an embedded font with licensing
> restrictions **
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)

BTW, this is actually the xdvipdfmx driver that's crashing, rather  
than xetex itself....

> Output written on test.pdf (1 page).
> Transcript written on test.log.

....which is why these lines still appeared. (xetex didn't notice  
that the driver crashed, as it had already sent all its output down  
the pipe.)

> Do you get a segfault if you use this font on your system.

I tried a small sample with this font on Mac OS X (PowerPC) and Linux  
(i386), and didn't get a segfault on either of these; the output  
looked OK (modulo the limited character set of the "tryout" font).

It may well be that the font is poor quality; that's true of many of  
the cheap or free TrueType fonts out there that were made with cheap  
or free tools. Apple's ftxvalidator utility does report several  
errors, though obviously the font is still able to work in many  
situations.

Another possibility is that xdvipdfmx has a bug that's leading to a  
crash with this font. (Well, even if the font is faulty, segfaulting  
is not a good response!) I'll try to investigate further, on another  
system or two. Does OpenBSD create a log/dump of some kind that shows  
a backtrace for the crash? Or can you run xdvipdfmx under gdb and  
generate one? To do this, you'd run "xelatex -no-pdf test", so it  
creates a file test.xdv on disk; then load xdvipdfmx under gdb, and  
run it with the command line "-E test.xdv".

JK



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