[XeTeX] Styles / Preferred Styles mismatch and 'broken pipe'

[Jonathan Kew]

On 25 Apr 2007, at 4:40 pm, Nikola Lecic wrote:

> Hello,
>
> An OTF font with Styles/Preferred Styles mismatch causes 'broken  
> pipe' in XeTeX 0-996 (FreeBSD binary at least).
>
> Of course, this is not a regular situation, I produced it by  
> accident -- altering some fonts for personal testing purposes. But  
> I guess that 'broken pipe' shouldn't happen even then, and that's  
> why I'm reporting this. (And indeed, this doesn't happen with XeTeX  
> 0.995.)

Thanks for the report.

The "Broken pipe" message indicates that xdvipdfmx aborted processing  
(with the message "Output file removed"), due to a fatal problem --  
in particular, failure to load a required font, because of the naming  
confusion. As xetex is still trying to send XDV output via a pipe,  
but the process reading it has now gone away, you get the "Broken  
pipe" message.

What version of fontconfig is installed on your system? Running  
"xetex --version" should report the library version number; this  
would be interesting. In particular, versions prior to 2.3 seem to  
have more problems finding fonts when there are multiple family and/ 
or style names, as in your example. The typical symptom with FC 2.2.x  
is that xetex finds the font OK during formatting, but then xdvipdfmx  
fails to find it at PDF generation time, which sounds like what's  
happening in your case.

JK