allowing use of fonts across texlive versions

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2021-06-12 at 13:04:10 +0200, Ulrike Fischer wrote:

 > Am Sat, 12 Jun 2021 11:28:28 +0200 schrieb Ulrike Fischer:
 >
 >
 > > Would it be possible to move the fonts from texmf-dist into a
 > > separate texmf-tree say texmf-fonts?
 >
 > Markus suggested to me off-list to use symlinks, something I hadn't
 > considered because I thought it doesn't work on windows (I think it
 > didn't at some time). But it works now. I needed admin rights but
 > then  could create a symbolic link with mklink and it seems work.
 >
 > It is a bit confusing as the windows explorer don't show the folder
 > and all log-files show "C:\texlive\2020", I hope I will remember
 > that this pathes are symbolic ;-)

The symlinks created with mklink under Windows are properly displayed
like

 <symlink> -> <link target>

with "ls -l" on Cygwin.  Maybe MSYS/minGW displays symlink targets too.

BTW, the stuff in bin/win32 is confusing too.  While on any other
system symlinks are used and displayed like

  pdflatex -> pdftex

on Windows pdflatex.exe is a very small program which simply loads
pdftex.dll and the LaTeX format file. Hence you cannot determine from
a directory listing which engeine is used by a particular format, not
even on Cygwin.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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