Bug#683943: luatex: fontconfig overridden by OSFONTDIR in default settings

[Frank Kuester <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org> writes:

> On 8 August 2012 20:53, Frank Kuester <frank@kuesterei.ch> wrote:
>> Hm, I just installed luatex and texlive-base in a chroot and get:
>>
>> root@riesling:/#  kpsewhich --var-value=OSFONTSDIR
>
> It's "OSFONTDIR", not "OSFONTSDIR".

I see, and must apologize.  Was a bit in a hurry when I answered to your
two bug reports.

Anyway, what I am not sure about is what we should do about this. The
documentation in texmf.cnf says:

% OSFONTDIR is to provide a convenient hook for allowing TeX to find
% fonts installed on the system (outside of TeX).  An empty default
% value would add "//" to the search paths, so we give it a dummy value.
OSFONTDIR = /usr/share/fonts

I am not sure whether luatex is correct in taking this as an alternative
to fontconfig.  I also didn't find anything about OSFONTDIR in
luatexref-t.pdf or the Debian documentation. On the contrary,
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Fonts_in_LuaTeX suggests to use this
variable.


The other question is which other engines use OSFONTDIR.  Note that some
other variables reference it, and need the "dummy setting" for speed:

T1FONTS = .;$TEXMF/fonts/type1//;$OSFONTDIR//
AFMFONTS = .;$TEXMF/fonts/afm//;$OSFONTDIR//
TTFONTS = .;$TEXMF/fonts/{truetype,opentype}//;$OSFONTDIR//
OPENTYPEFONTS = .;$TEXMF/fonts/{opentype,truetype}//;$OSFONTDIR//

So it could be that we would need to have a OSFONTDIR.luatex variable
instead that is empty?

Regards, Frank