[texworks] Mac OS TeXworks + fontconfig (was: Another TeXworks mac build (with a buildsystem!))

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 May 2011, at 13:10, Stefan Löffler wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On 2011-05-13 06:35, Charlie Sharpsteen wrote:
>> I could add a file to the TeXworks source that apackager could use to
>> install Poppler thusly:
>> 
>>    brew install --with-qt4 --enable-xpdf-headers cmake/packaging/mac/poppler.rb
>> 
>> And the patches in `lib-patches` would be applied automatically.
> 
> Sounds good to me. It's really just the poppler-qt4-globalparams.patch,
> as poppler-win32-font-handling.patch only applies to Windows-specific files.
> 
>> So, I guess the question is---how badly do we want to get rid of
>> Fontconfig? Leaving it in is starting to look like the easiest course
>> of action on OS X.
> 
> This is up to Jonathan Kew to decide (I explicitly CC'ed him to this
> mail, hopefully he'll reply), as he set up the original "no-fontconfig"
> policy. Not being a Mac developer or user myself, I can only abide by
> the judgment of those who must live with the consequences (whatever they
> may be).

There are a few questions that I think need answering before making a definite statement here.

Does the fontconfig-based build recognize the correct collection of installed fonts (so that PDFs that use any of those fonts, and don't have them embedded, will display as expected on the user's system)? On my laptop here, I notice that the list of fonts shown by fc-list in the Terminal does *not* seem to match the list displayed by Apple's ftxinstalledfonts (from the Apple Font Tool suite), so I'm a bit suspicious that the two "worlds" are not necessarily kept in sync properly.

Does this version of fontconfig work without adding cache files to each font directory that it scans? It used to do that, but perhaps Apple has customized it so as to avoid this, or at least make the cache files invisible? (I didn't see font cache files on my laptop, so I think this issue may have been solved.)

What happens if the TeXworks user doesn't have the X11 package installed? At least on older OS versions, it was a non-default optional install, so IMO an application like TW that aims to be a Mac OS app (rather than an X11 app) should not depend on it.

JK