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

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 11:24:22AM +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 2014-10-17 9:56 GMT+02:00 Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org>:
> > 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).
> >
> I did it on my computer. Depending on the exact Linux and Inkscape
> version there are some problems. Inkscape probably makes its own font
> database which takes more than one hour, thus the startup is delayed
> and if you start it by an icon, during startup nothing is seen. In
> some versions it is done just once, in some version during eac
> startup.

Doing it from within XeTeX would avoid this of course, as the fonts will
be accessible only to XeTeX. But there are other potential issues, like
when different versions of the same font are provided by the system and
TeX Live, the one that will be used is rather arbitrary.

Regards,
Khaled