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

[Chris Jones]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 06:10:21PM EST, Peter Baker wrote:
> Chris Jones wrote:

[..]

> 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?

$ fontforge -version
Copyright (c) 2000-2008 by George Williams.
 Executable based on sources from 00:29 GMT 29-Apr-2008.
 Library based on sources from 20:49 GMT 30-Apr-2008.
fontforge 20080429
libfontforge 20080430

But I'm only indexing one font, and the script appears to grab a huge
chunk of memory at startup: when I did a 'ulimit -v 128000' which should
be roughly 128 Meg, it borked right at the beginning, not like a memory
leak that builds up over time.

That's why I was thinking there might be some obscure python option that
causes this with 2.5 and maybe got fixed with 2.6.

The only thing I have been able to ascertain is that it seems to be
related to the size of the fontfile: works fine with 300K files for
instance.

But since the machines freezes up when problem occurs, it's difficult to
run tentative tests to try and narrow it down a bit.

Thanks for your patience, I'm not sure where I can go from there.

CJ