[XeTeX] Loading fonts from a common server or http URL

[Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)]

Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) wrote:

> It is more a *fontspec* question and may be it has wider scope...
> Is it possible to load fonts from http URLs?
> i.e., can I do this:
> \fontspec{http://www.ctan.org/public/fonts/STIXGeneral.otf}.

I think it is more of a [Xe]TeX-engine question, to be honest,
and one that has never really been satisfactorily resolved.
Because just as you might want to write :

	> \fontspec {http://www.ctan.org/public/fonts/STIXGeneral.otf}.

you might also want to write

	\usepackage {http://example.org/LaTeX/Classes/keyval.cls}

Indeed, anywhere in [La][Xe]TeX [1] that you want to open a file for
reading (be it font file, source file, data file or whatever),
it would be nice if that file could be on a remote server and
fetched using http.

Unfortunately I am not aware of any implementation of [Xe]TeX
that supports this; probably the most likely candidate would
be LuaTeX (Taco cc'd) but I do not think that even LuaTeX
yet supports this concept.

Philip Taylor
--------
[1] Or indeed, anywhere at all within your PC/Macintosh/Unix box/whatever.
The problem is not unique to TeX, and it is not at all clear to me
why filing systems have not yet evolved to allow remote http-served
files to be read-accessed using the same interface as local files.