[tex-live] inclusion of libraries

Ralf Stubner ralf.stubner at physik.uni-erlangen.de
Wed May 24 22:11:43 CEST 2006


Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> writes:

> Does this mean that a typical IRIX system (with whatever graphical  
> interface and desktop manager is used there) uses a different way of  
> managing/locating fonts? If so, the most appropriate thing to do is  
> probably to create an alternative implementation of the XeTeXFontMgr  
> module that is used to locate fonts on the host platform.

I am not sure if support for some legacy font managing/locating system
is worth the effort. 

> Or does it mean that the IRIX box in question was not configured as a  
> desktop workstation with GUI software, OpenType and TrueType fonts,  
> etc. but as some other kind of setup? It's perfectly possible to run  
> a Linux box without fontconfig, too -- but XeTeX is probably less  
> relevant on such setups, so maybe we should not try to target them  
> for now.

The ability to use Unicode input without problems might be interesting
on such a machine, too. Of course, there is the problem how fonts are to
be found. Besides as additional interface to access fonts that you
mentioned in a later message, there might be an other/additional
possibility:

* XeTeX is statically linked against fontconfig which looks for
  /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. If this file does not exist, TeX Live installs
  the default version (which should not be changed anyway)

* directories below texmf-dist/fonts/{truetype,opentype} (and maybe
  type1, too) get fonts.cache-1 files so that fontconfig can use these
  fonts in principle

* a file '10-TeXLive' or some such is placed in /etc/fonts/conf.d which
  references these directories and is included form
  /etc/fonts/fonts.conf in the default configuration 

On systems that already use fontconfig, (some) fonts provided with TeX
Live would be integrated into the system and XeTeX can use them. On
systems without priour fontconfig, XeTeX could at least use TT/OT fonts
provided with TeX Live. But all that might be details for later ...

cheerio
ralf





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