[BUG] Cannot proceed without the font: [...].woff2 problem

[Jonathan Kew]

On 02/04/2025 18:53, David Carlisle wrote:
> > Hope this will help fixing the problem.
>
> But as I say the real issue is a mis-configuration on the user 
> machine, what was intended to be achieved by installing a woff2 font 
> in a directory indexed by fontconfig?

Although WOFF2 (and the original WOFF) was designed as a packaging 
format for webfonts, and not intended for installation in desktop 
systems, support for directly using them as desktop fonts then got added 
to FreeType, and hence a lot of software will actually work with them.

In this case, I think what's happening is that fontconfig lists the 
WOFF2 font, and since xetex uses FreeType to access fonts, it is able to 
handle it (essentially, FreeType decodes the WOFF2 packaging and 
compression, so as far as xetex is concerned it's just an OpenType 
font). So there's no error reported by xetex itself. But xdvipdfmx 
doesn't use FreeType to read fonts; it has its own 
TrueType/OpenType-processing code. And it has not been extended to 
support WOFF2. So when it tries to process the xetex output that refers 
to a WOFF2 font resource, it fails (with this somewhat confusing error 
message).

>
> the systems could perhaps give better error messages but the bug is 
> the incorrect font installation.
> Whatever error message is generated, the fix is to move the font.

Yes, that'll be the simplest fix.

In the longer term, there are various possible ways the situation could 
be improved, but probably none are on the immediate horizon.

JK

>
> David
>
>
> On Wed, 2 Apr 2025 at 18:26, Nikolay Shaplov <dhyan at nataraj.su> wrote:
>
>     В письме от среда, 2 апреля 2025 г. 19:00:40 MSK пользователь
>     David Carlisle
>     написал:
>
>     > It probably would be possible to make fontspec filter them out
>     and offer a
>     > different error message
>     > but tex-live list isn't the place for package enhancement requests,
>     > they can only distribute what the package authors provide
>     (fontspec is at
>     > https://github.com/latex3/fontspec/issues
>     > )
>     >
>     > (You could change the error at the point in dvipdfmx where you
>     show but I
>     > think the real problem is earlier, fontspec has trusted fontconfig
>
>     Thanks for quick answer. I've reported problem with missleading
>     error message
>     in dvipdfmx
>     https://tug.org/pipermail/dvipdfmx/2025-April/000375.html, hope it
>     is the right pace.
>
>     And reported problem with getting .woff[2] files in font list here:
>     https://github.com/latex3/fontspec/issues/543
>
>     Hope this will help fixing the problem.
>
>     -- 
>     Nikolay Shaplov aka Nataraj
>     Fuzzing Engineer at Postgres Professional
>     Matrix IM: @dhyan:nataraj.su <http://nataraj.su>
>
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