[tex-live] XeTeX and ConTeXt

[George N. White III]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 3:19 PM, John Hughes <jkhughes2 at googlemail.com> wrote:

> I have just installed TeX Live 2008 on Windows and am having some
> problems with XeTeX and ConTeXt. The first problem is that XeTeX
> cannot access system fonts (using fontspec with xelatex). I have tried
> running fc-cache -v -r, which generates the following output:

Did you install from DVD, download, etc?

> /usr/share/fonts: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 5 dirs
> /usr/share/fonts/100dpi: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
> /usr/share/fonts/75dpi: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
> /usr/share/fonts/cyrillic: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
> /usr/share/fonts/encodings: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 1 dirs
> /usr/share/fonts/encodings/large: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
> /usr/share/fonts/misc: caching, new cache contents: 48 fonts, 0 dirs
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts: skipping, no such directory
> /home/username/.fonts: skipping, no such directory
> /var/cache/fontconfig: cleaning cache directory
> /home/username/.fontconfig: not cleaning non-existent cache directory
> fc-cache: succeeded
>
> It seems to be looking for Linux directories rather than Windows ones.
> How can I tell it to look in the usual Windows directories?

I vaguely recall encountering a problem with the configuration for fontconfig.
I think there are different files for linux and windows.  I wonder if the linux
paths are a default used when it doesn't find the windows-specific
configuration.   You should check carefully for remants of some old
TeX distro.  A number of other packages (gimp?) also use fontconfig,
so it is possible you are getting a binary or config file other than the
one from TL.

> My second problem is that ConTeXt's texexec doesn't do anything. The
> program is installed, but when I try to run texexec there is a short
> pause and then nothing happens. There are no error messages at all, it
> just doesn't seem to do anything.
>
> Any help on either issue would be greatly appreciated.

Do you have ruby?   There has been a lot of progress on ConteXt Mkiv
since TL2008 was created.   I find the TL version works fine for some
legacy documents, but if you want to use the new stuff you should get
the ConTeXt minimals.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia