[texworks] Mac OS TeXworks + fontconfig

[Charlie Sharpsteen]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 2:16 AM, Stefan Löffler <st.loeffler at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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?

Fontconfig uses `MS Gothic`, which I would never suspect to contain
CJK glyphs. Dohyun noted that the glyphs used are correct, although
they are sans-serif when a serif family would be the correct
substitution.  Interesting to note is that Preview (the standard OS X
PDF viewer) appears to render the font correctly while TeXshop (which
uses Apple's PDFKit library) shows gibberish.


>> 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

I guess we could do something like that---but I have absolutely no
idea what a suitable selection of CJK fonts would be. Seems like it
could be much easier to let Fontconfig find system fonts. Users could
also override its choices using a Fonconfig configuration file.

I don't really know where to go from here---keep Fontconfig or move to
Quartz? Note that:

  - Fontconfig-based build will still run on systems without X11
installed, it just won't be able to display non-embedded fonts.

  - X11 is installed by default for Leopard and Snow Leopard. No idea
about the upcoming Lion release next month, I would assume it is still
there but can't say for sure. If anyone in the OS X developer program
can comment without violating a non disclosure agreement, that would
be awesome ;)