[XeTeX] Fwd: fontspec question on windows

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 Jul 2008, at 1:44 pm, Will Robertson wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've got a request below that I'm rather ignorant about. (I stopped  
> using Windows a while back, so I can't really test XeTeX-related  
> stuff on Windows very easily.) Apparently XeTeX can't load fonts  
> under Windows when they've got names than involve certain UTF-8  
> characters?!
>
> Can anyone either confirm this problem or let me know that  
> something else funny is going on here?
>

I expect it's a limitation of how xetex and fontconfig work on  
Windows, and there's probably nothing you can do at the macro package  
level.

I hadn't heard of this before, but if someone can provide a simple  
test case that demonstrates the problem I'll try to look into it and  
see if we can improve things. It won't happen before the TeX Live  
2008 release is out the door, though.

One thing to do would be to try both MikTeX and TeX Live (or W32TeX)  
binaries, and see if there's any difference in behavior.

JK


> Many thanks,
> Will
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: Michiel Kamermans [EMAIL REDACTED]
>> To: Will Robertson <wspr81 at gmail.com>
>>
>> Hi Will,
>>
>> I was wondering whether you knew how to work around this problem:  
>> xetex files are utf8 files, but font names in windows are not  
>> encoded in utf8, so fontspec cannot load every system font  
>> available. As long as the font name contains only ascii characters  
>> this is not a problem, but for 'foreign' named fonts it means  
>> xetex throws up an error because it cannot find the font specfied,  
>> as windows is still using the utterly moronic codepage system  
>> behind the scenes. Even in vista/windows 2008 this is still the  
>> case, and the last thing I'm counting on is microsoft rewriting  
>> their core to be fully utf8 unicode compliant... =/
>>
>> How (im)possible would it be to detect which OS fontspec is being  
>> used on, and using an iconv-like conversion for font names from  
>> UTF-8 to whichever codepage windows is set to use, so that all  
>> system fonts can be used in xetex on windows systems? (this  
>> problem does not exist on utf8 supporting *nixen like ubuntu etc.  
>> but running a virtual machine just for xetex is a bit silly if a  
>> solution to the fontspec package is an option =)
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> -- 
>> Michiel Kamermans, M.Sc
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