[XeTeX] Finding out if a font supports a particular Unicode character and using it

[Peter Baker]

Chris Jones wrote:
>
> I attempted to build an index file against GNU/unifont with the latest
> version of fontswith and eventually had to do a hard reset of the linux
> system.  Apparently I had run out of memory. I waited about fifteen
> minutes before I did the hard reset, giving fontswith what I thought was
> a reasonable amount of time to terminate.
>
> The last stats I saw indicated that fontswith was using over one Gig of
> memory - about 300 Meg of RAM and about 50% of my swap partition, which
> is a little under 1.5 Gig. 
>
>   
One more thought: when I was writing the script, there was a point when 
I had forgotten to call close() on the fonts I had opened. Of course the 
script quickly gobbled up all the memory and frotzed the machine! 
Presumably you're running into some kind of severe memory leak, the 
memory for the fonts not getting released. But it could be either Python 
or FontForge.

How old is your copy of FontForge?

Peter