[texworks] Mac OS TeXworks + fontconfig

[Stefan Löffler]

On 2011-06-13 21:31, Charlie Sharpsteen wrote:
> 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.

I guess fontconfig uses some more elaborate substitution routines. The
one in the Quartz backend really only work if you have some garbage
attached to the font name, some variant (e.g., bold-italic) is not
available.

> 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?"

FWIW, Tw and evince on Linux (both using poppler+fontconfig) show the
file properly, whereas Adobe Acrobat complains about missing language
supports and only displays dots...
What font is substituted by Fontconfig, anyway? Is there any obvious
relation to the requested font?

> 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.

Could be take a similar approach to the one on Windows? There, poppler
is patched such that it looks for fonts in a subdirectory alongside the
main binary. That way, important base fonts (all, or just a subset as
for Windows which doesn't come with a suitable ZapfDingbats) can be
provided by the TeXworks application. To quote the PDF standard: "these
[14 base] fonts, or their font metrics and suitable substitution fonts,
must be available to the consumer application."
I don't know how this fits into the bundling-of-apps scheme, though.

-Stefan