[Fontconfig] Difficulty finding a font file through the libraries

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2021 02:10:23 -0600, Michael Brennen wrote:

> Looking at this again tonight, as I understand it now, I think the
> only way to understand what is happening would be to download and
> compile the fontconfig src rpm, then hack the gs make scripts to link
> to the src fontconfig’s libraries.

Can you put it in a container, to avoid interfering with the production
libraries? Rather than try to debug that particular Fontconfig version,
just try putting in the latest one from source, and see if it works
better, would be the simplest thing I would try first.

> It is taking me a while to sort through the various structures to
> understand the data types and how the overall structure fits
> together. Is there documentation on that?

On my Debian system there is the libfontconfig-doc package, which
installs a bunch of pages in both HTML and man-page format. That’s
mainly what I’ve been relying on.

If it helps, writing test programs in Python would be easier than in C.
That’s why I created my Python wrapper for fontconfig
<https://github.com/ldo/python_fontconfig>, and provided some example
code here <https://github.com/ldo/python_fontconfig_examples>.