Fontconfig library issue with Python 3.9 on Apple Silicon
If you're working on older Python projects that may use certain PDF libraries, you may have encountered this exception before:
OSError: ctypes.util.find_library() did not manage to locate a library called 'fontconfig'
The root cause is that the Python package is still looking in the usual x86-centric paths to find the library; this breaks on Apple Silicon because there, Homebrew installs everything in /opt. Newer versions of the package fix this, but in the meantime you can easily make the existing package work with a few symlinks:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib
sudo ln -s /opt/homebrew/lib/libfontconfig.1.dylib /usr/local/lib/libfontconfig.1.dylib
sudo ln -s /opt/homebrew/lib/libfontconfig.a /usr/local/lib/libfontconfig.a
sudo ln -s /opt/homebrew/lib/libfontconfig.dylib /usr/local/lib/libfontconfig.dylib
Still no success? Try:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib
sudo cp $(brew --prefix fontconfig)/lib/libfontconfig.* /usr/local/lib