[XeTeX] XeTeX segmentation faults

Musa Furber musaf at runbox.com
Tue Jun 15 14:09:37 CEST 2004


Mr. Kew,

On 15 Jun 2004, at 14:41, Jonathan Kew wrote:

>
> 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....

There must be some sort of caching. Logging out and rebooting did not 
solve anything, so I used a system utility to clear out the various 
system caches, rebooted, and the problem was solved. The program I used 
was OnyX; there is probably an easier way to do this.

XeTeX now renders the test.ltx just fine.

The fonts I had installed were: jardot, penman, primerprint, 
learningcurve, and zyia-learns-letters.

>> 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.)

Since I am using pdflatex primarily, I use ``this convention''---and 
this. The latter two work just fine. The `` does not.

As nice as Hoefler Text is, it unfortunately does not have Unicode 
glyphs for all of  the characters I need for Arabic transliteration (D, 
d, H, h, S, s, T, t, Z, z with dots underneath). LaTeX with Computer 
Modern produces them all using \d{x} (where x is the desired 
character). Unfortunately, it just does not come out well in Hoefler 
under XeTeX.

Is this anything that can be fixed in XeTeX?

I plan to work with Arabic in the future. XeTeX should offer better 
Arabic font possibilities than ArabTeX and Omega, so I would like move 
into XeTeX.

And thanks much for the help.

Regards,
Musa



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