[XeTeX] XeTeX segmentation faults

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 Jun 2004, at 12:23 pm, Musa Furber wrote:

>
> On 15 Jun 2004, at 11:27, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>> On 15 Jun 2004, at 8:42 am, Musa Furber wrote:
>>> Here is the last entry in the xelatex log:
>>>
>>> [...]
>>
>> OK, that's helpful. I remember you mentioned that the samples using 
>> CM fonts worked OK, but others crashed; this is consistent with that 
>> behavior. It looks like there is a font installed in your system that 
>> is somehow confusing Apple Type Services; possibly a damaged/corrupt 
>> font file.
>>
>
> Yes, I did add a four penmanship fonts, hoping to give my son 
> something to do with his spare time during the Summer break. Two of 
> the four fonts deactivated easily, while two refused. So I deleted 
> them. The two that did not want to be deactivated also refused to be 
> removed from the GUI, though no problems from the shell.
>
> I still get segmentation faults.
>
> What exactly do I need to do to ensure that those fonts, once gone, 
> will no longer have any bearing on XeTeX? Will I need to remove XeTeX 
> and reinstall, or is font removal enough?

I don't see any reason you should need to remove/reinstall XeTeX; it 
has no persistent state or caching of font information between runs, or 
anything like that. Have you restarted since removing the suspect 
fonts? I wonder if the ATS system might be caching something and 
require a restart (or at least logout) in order to clear things.

If the segfault problem still persists (check the crash log to see if 
it's still crashing in the same place, within ATS called from 
init_font_dict), then I think there's still some kind of bad font 
lurking somewhere.

Aha.... While writing this, your next message arrived:

> Regarding my message about segmentation faults after removing the 
> fonts. I checked in another application, and those fonts still are 
> listed, and still do not want to be removed.
>
> Is there anything I can use instead of Fontbook that will do a better 
> job of removing the fonts?

So they're not really gone yet. Try logging out (or restarting), to 
ensure that any process that's currently using the fonts gets 
terminated, and then remove them from the Library/Fonts folder(s) using 
the Finder. I'm not sure exactly how Fontbook deals with things....

> I'll start fiddling a bit more.
>
> Thanks much for the pointer. I am sure that this will be resolved soon.
>
> As a side issue: The file I rendered with XeLaTeX previously had 
> something that may be of interest. While '' was rendered as a 
> smart-close-quote, ``was rendered as two marks and not as a 
> smart-begin-quote.

Rendering `` and '' as "smart" double quotes is a feature of the .tfm 
files associated with CM and other standard TeX fonts; it isn't normal 
behavior for AAT or OpenType fonts. (In principle, they could include 
ligature rules to do this, but they're not used that way in practice.) 
When using Unicode fonts, there are separate characters for the various 
"real" typographic quotes; that's the appropriate thing to use.

(For existing documents, it would be possible to write clever TeX 
macros that replace `` with \char"201C, etc., but I really wouldn't 
recommend it. If you're working with legacy TeX fonts, use the old TeX 
conventions for quotes, dashes, accents, etc.; but if you're working 
with Unicode text and fonts, use the proper Unicode characters.)

Regards,

Jonathan