[tex-live] fc-cache documentation ?

[Philip Taylor]

Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
> Yes, it would be helpful to mention fc-cache in addition to fc-list.
> Do you have any concrete suggestion to improve that paragraph?
Not yet, because I have been using fc-cache only since yesterday and do not as yet have any idea why (a) things seemed to suddenly go a lot slower, and (b) then speeded up again after running fc-cache.  Is it the case (for example), that if I add a single font to the Windows font collection, then even if that font is not referenced by my XeTeX sources it is nonetheless necessary to manually run "fc-cache C:/Windows/Fonts" before I will once again be able to compile without waiting well over ten seconds for the first font to load ?
>> To be told that "the font is looked up through the operating system, using the fontconfig library" does not really make it clear that if one is experiencing significant delays loading fonts that one needs to search outside the TeX Live documentation in order to learn how to address such issues.
> Indeed, this is not stated in the reference documentation.  Nor do I
> think it is necessarily true.  And this issue is clearly about XeTeX,
> not TeX Live.
I respectfully disagree.  The TeX Live manager exposes an interface to "the font map database" (whatever that is), which is presumably used not by TeX Live itself (apart from the TeX Live Manager and the local and remote repositories, it is hard to think of anything that /is/ TeX Live rather than software installed /by/ TeX Live), yet it does not expose an interface to fontconfig.  Presumably the font map database is crucial to some element(s) of the software that are installed by TeX Live (?LaTeX?), just as fontconfig is crucial to other elements of that software (XeTeX), so why expose an interface to one but not the other ?
-- 

Philip Taylor
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