[XeTeX] Text output garbled after system update -- your ideas?

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:37:40 +0000 schrieb Kārlis Repsons:


> One thing confuses me:
> if I install and use Linux Libertine with help of my packaging system (system-
> wide), it gives just about what I desire. System folders have nothing really 
> more than the actual fonts and a few collateral files. But if I look into 
> texlive-module-libertine-2010.tar.xz, there are various (quite many) other 
> files of type .sty, .inc, .fd and others... What for?

Well (pdf)latex needs them. They contain mostly information about
which real font should be used with every combination of font
command (\bfseries, \scshape, \ttfamily ...).  xelatex needs less of
these files because it can extract quite a lot informations directly
from the font itself, so fontspec is doing most of the works.

> 
> So the question is:
> if I choose to:
> * keep contents of a full TeXLive installation;
> * not link it's fonts for global use with fontconfig;
> * maintain my own folder of fonts,
> can it work without conflicts and is there a risk to loose some functionality?

Actually this sound like a good idea. xetex relies on fontconfig for
the font search. So if you remove the texmf trees from its
fontconfig configuration xetex will use only the system fonts. While
pdflatex will still be able to use all the normal type1 fonts in the
texmf trees. 

You will perhaps have to copy some open type fonts from the texmf
tree to your system font folder. E.g. the latin modern fonts and the
open type math fonts.


>> The case is different for different font formats: pdftex/latex+dvips
>> still needs type1 fonts. So removing them could be a problem.

> Those, which live within TeXLive installation? Or Type1 as such is considered 
> obsolete/obsoleting??

I'm not sure I understand the question. Type1 is considered by some
people as obsolete and in the long run the format will probably
disappear. But quite a lot pdflatex/latex+dvips and even xelatex
documents would break if you remove the type1 fonts from texlive.


-- 
Ulrike Fischer