On Fri, 7 Sep 2012, Zdenek Wagner wrote: > requires newer version of fontspec. I am not able to compile the > latest fontspec and replace it in my Linux version. Thus the only > solution was to use the system Deja Vu fonts that produce different > line breaks and different page breaks. Of course, for some fonts it > would work.
The same kind of problem can occur any time a document requires a new version of a package and you try to compile it on a system with an older version. I don't think that has much to do with font pathname specification, which I thought was the question. My claim was only that relative pathnames are useful and allow documents to be portable when they include their necessary fonts. Including the font with the document is the only real way to be sure that it can compile identically on a foreign system. If the document also depends on something else the recipient doesn't have, or if the recipient's system cannot process the font that the document requires, then I think it should be clear that using a relative pathname isn't going to magically solve the unrelated issues. This kind of thing - the idea that all documents should be compilable everywhere - is exactly why the TeX/LaTeX world have their Byzantine path-searching system, licenses that forbid modification unless you also change the filenames, and default "we dare not EVER fix any bugs because we don't want to break documents that depend on them" attitude. XeTeX seems not to be following that tradition, and the fact of using system-installed fonts which might not be consistent from one system to the next is just part of it. We can debate how important the "absolute portability" requirement is, but I doubt that XeTeX's approach is going to change soon. -- Matthew Skala msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca People before principles. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
