[texworks] Mac OS TeXworks + fontconfig

Charlie Sharpsteen chuck at sharpsteen.net
Mon Jun 13 21:31:24 CEST 2011


Allright, looks like we have a new wrinkle in that pTeX does not embed fonts:

    http://tug.org/pipermail/texworks/2011q2/004361.html

The font in question is a CJK font, "Ryumin-Light-Identity-H". It
looks like Fontconfig chooses a more or less appropriate fallback
while the Quartz backend just iteratively peels hyphenated sections
from the font name then gives up and substitutes Helvetica.  Another
thing to note is that the fallback used by Fontconfig can be
customized by editing `~/.fonts.conf`.

So, unless anyone has some good ideas on how to add fallback support
to the Quartz font handler, we may be back to the question of "should
we implement native mac fonts or just use Fontconfig?"

The only downside that I have found with Fontconfig is that users
won't see non-embedded fonts unless their copy of OS X has X11
installed. X11 is installed by default in OS X 10.5.x and 10.6.x, but
could be missing if the user customized their installation and
optimized for size. Not sure what the situation is for 10.7, but I
guess we will find out next month.

Thoughts?

-Charlie


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