[XeTeX] XeTeX + fontspec + sazanami = no output (?)

[Jonathan Kew]

On 11 Jan 2008, at 9:24 am, Peter Dyballa wrote:

>
> Am 11.01.2008 um 02:19 schrieb Wilfred van Rooijen:
>
>> There is no output. Is this due to the font?
>
> It's not enough to put the font file somewhere on the disk, it has to
> be a designated place. You also need to make it known to the system.
> The command is fc-cache or 'sudo fc-cache'. With fc-list you can
> check whether it's known.

The font must have been installed where fontspec could find it,  
otherwise there would be errors from xelatex. But the OP reported:

> However,
> when I use the mincho, Xetex fails:
>
> (/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/xelatex/fontspec/ 
> fontspec.cfg))
> (./xelatex_japans.aux) [1] (./xelatex_japans.aux) )
>
> Output file removed.
> Output written on xelatex_japans.pdf (1 page).
> Transcript written on xelatex_japans.log.
>
> There is no output. Is this due to the font?

The xelatex run finished without complaint, so it must have found the  
font; but xdvipdfmx failed for some reason, and deleted the (bad) PDF  
file it was trying to create. (The next version of xetex will give a  
better error message in this situation, as the transcript above is  
quite confusing.)

This might be due to a problem in the Mincho font; or it might be a  
bug in xdvipdfmx; or it might be due to an old version of fontconfig.  
I've seen a number of cases where older fontconfig libraries lead to  
failures.

For this reason, it would be interesting to see the output of

   xetex -version

which will report the library versions actually found at runtime. I'd  
recommend using at least fontconfig 2.3, and preferably newer (the  
current release is 2.5.0, but I expect few distros are using that  
just yet).

JK