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Preflight

The preflight command performs environment and dependency checks required by the Fontshow pipeline.

It is intended as the first step in any workflow.


Purpose

Preflight verifies that:

  • the execution environment is supported
  • required external tools are available
  • optional capabilities (e.g. LaTeX) are detected
  • known incompatibilities are reported early

No files are created or modified.


Invocation

fontshow preflight

Options

The preflight command supports the standard global flags:

Flag Description
-v, --verbose Show detailed check results
-q, --quiet Suppress all output
-V, --version Show Fontshow version
--help Show usage information

Output

By default, preflight prints a short summary:

Preflight passed.

With --verbose, individual checks are shown:

[ OK ] environment.support: Running on supported Linux bare-metal environment
[ OK ] font_discovery.capability: fontconfig available
[ OK ] latex.capability: LuaLaTeX available
Preflight passed.

When --quiet is specified, no output is produced.


Exit codes

Code Meaning
0 All required checks passed
1 One or more blocking checks failed

Warnings do not affect the exit code unless explicitly promoted.


Notes

  • Preflight does not inspect fonts or inventories
  • Results are not persisted
  • The command is safe to run repeatedly

For the design rationale and execution model, see decisions.md.