hi there,
I've hit on a nasty problem with fontconfig within the MacOS X port of
LilyPond. This program is delivered as a app-bundle, and can be
installed by ordinary users, simply by drag & dropping the bundle
somewhere.
The problem is that MacOS ships with a bunch of fonts in
/System/Library/Fonts. Whenever our application starts
it scans this directory. This takes several minutes due to the oriental
fonts. fc-cache cannot cache this directory, since it is not writable by
ordinary users.
I hope I'm missing an obvious solution, but a cursory glace at the FC
sources indicate that cache files are always written in the font
directory itself.
Of course, I can kludge around this,
- mirror /System/Library/Fonts with symlinks in a writable directory
(I will probably use this kludge.)
- ask the user for their password, and run fc-cache with sudo
- write an installer that runs fc-cache.
however, none of these strike me as elegant. It would be better if the
cache could be stored separately from the directory, under control of
the process-owner. This also makes more sense if -for some reason-
applications decide to add system-wide read-only font directories that
are normally not part of a fontconfig installation
(/usr/share/texmf/fonts/type1 springs to mind).
--
Han-Wen Nienhuys - hanwen@xxxxxxxxx - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen
