[tex-live] Comment on libfontconfig

[Frank Küster]

Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:

> If I knew how to configure the build so that libfontconfig was "weak- 
> linked", so that xetex could run without the library present (and  
> test before calling its APIs), then I guess we could have a binary  
> that runs without fontconfig; you'd lose the ability to automatically  
> find fonts by name in that situation (but then, what would "installed  
> fonts" mean in this context?); you could still load them explicitly  
> by filename, though, and do Unicode/OpenType typesetting that way.
>
> But at this point I don't know how to do that in the Linux world (or  
> these various others), and I don't think it's a high priority.

I thinkt the solution is dlopen(3) on Linux.  Just in case you didn't
know the keyword; I don't know much more than that: It allows loading
and accessing libraries at runtime, with the possibility to check for
success without getting weird user errors.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)