[tex-live] Font features linked with fontspec-preparse-external apparently broken in fontspec

[Khaled Hosny]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 10:32:56PM +0200, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> On 2014-10-15 at 10:28:46 +0200, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
> 
>  > Am Wed, 15 Oct 2014 06:49:32 +0200 schrieb Bruno Voisin:
>  > 
>  > > Thanks for this. I should have provided more background: calling
>  > > fonts by name is indeed the simplest, it works with LuaLaTeX
>  > > whether the fonts are installed at the OS level or in the texmf
>  > > trees, but with XeLaTeX only when the fonts are installed at the
>  > > OS level.
>  > 
>  > I can without problem call fonts installed in the texmf tree by
>  > names in windows. 
> 
> It's because xetex is using its own fontconfig under Windows, hence
> it comes with its own config file.
> 
> On all other systems the fontconfig library provided by the OS is
> used.  This is necessary because the font setup is different on
> different systems.
> 
> Thus xetex can use fonts in texmf trees on Windows only.  However, a
> Linux distributor could configure fontconfig so that fonts in texmf
> trees can be used like system fonts.

It should be fairly easy to make XeTeX instruct FontConfig/Core Text to
look for fonts under TEXMF tree, but I'm worried that some fonts there
are not built with the idea that they would be exposed to system
libraries and may be badly built (AFAIK that is the reason distributions
don't just added those fonts to FontConfig search paths).

Regards,
Khaled