[tex-live] Fontconfig for XeTeX versus regular fontconfig

Khaled Hosny khaledhosny at eglug.org
Thu Nov 3 00:49:58 CET 2011


On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 12:40:01AM +0100, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 2011/10/30 Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org>:
> > On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 08:40:35AM +0100, Jonathan Kew wrote:
> >> On 28 Oct 2011, at 22:44, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> >>
> >> > On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 10:39:13PM +0100, Jonathan Kew wrote:
> >> >> I believe the worst of the problems with xetex/xdvipdfmx font
> >> >> mismatches due to multiple versions of the same-named font could
> >> >> actually be fixed fairly easily, by modifying xetex so that (when
> >> >> using fontconfig to find fonts) it always writes the absolute path to
> >> >> the font file into the xdv output (as if the font had been specified
> >> >> by absolute pathname in the source document).
> >> >
> >> > It turned out not that hard, the attached (very minimal patch) will
> >> > cause xetex to always write the full path to the XDV file (or so shows
> >> > the dviasm I patched, which makes me feel very confident :p) No idea
> >> > how this would affect xdv2pdf, though.
> >>
> >> It would break xetex on macosx (whether using xdvipdfmx or xdv2pdf),
> >> where getFontFilename(engine) will often return NULL.
> >>
> >> Yes, the change is not hard, as I said earlier, but it does need to be
> >> done with care. Probably something like this (untested) would work:
> >
> > But this leaves the original issue partially unfixed, may be we would
> > instead make sure getFontFilename(engine) returns a file name, if
> > xdvipdfmx can resolve a file name the font name, then surely xetex can,
> > or does sdvipdfmx use some system API that returns font data from
> > memory? (off to check the code :) )
> >
> Apparently xdvipdfmx _does_ use a different API. If XeTeX were not
> able to find a font, it would complain and use \nullfont. However, I
> have an error message from xdvipdfmx, not from XeTeX. It seems to me
> that XeTeX finds a font bud xdvipdfmx does not. I had problems of this
> kind with the Nafees fonts, now (when testing someone else's file) the
> same happens with Pothana2000 (Telugu font).

Do you have a test file I can try? I want to check if this fix really
improves things (I don't see why it shouldn't, but just in case).

Regards,
 Khaled


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