Re: teTeX-2.0.2 file permissions
On 11 Mar 2003, Piet van Oostrum wrote: > >>>>> George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (GW) wrote: > > GW> Quoting Piet van Oostrum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > >> xdvizilla (in tetex-src-2.0.2/texk/xdvik/) appears to be missing the x > >> permission. > > GW> On my linux system the x-permission was set (by install -- the default > GW> is 755 which is why you need the -m 644 option to install > GW> documentation) when the file was installed. Why does the permission in > GW> the source tree matter? Are you using a funny version of install? > > It was the only thing installed in bin that missed the x permission. > The install is, I think, a home-brewn script. It says: > > Usage: install [-c] [-s] [-o own] [-g grp] [-m mode] src dst > Or:install [-o own] [-g grp] [-m mode] -d dir > option c : copy (obsolete) > option s : try to strip dst > option o : (possibly numeric) owner ident > option g : (possibly numeric) group ident > option m : mode (in octal eg 755 ) GNU install says: -m, --mode=MODE set permission mode (as in chmod), instead of rwxr-xr-x I takes this to mean that the default mode is 755, so you must use '-m' for non-executable files. SGI's /sbin/install is more explicit -m mode Set the mode of created files to mode, interpreted as an octal number. The default mode for regular files and directories is 755. The default mode for devices and named pipes is 666. This option is ignored if given with -ln or -lns. Unless you are the only person whose install program preserves the mode of the original file, then the makefiles should explicitly set the mode for executable files as well as the others, or perhaps just supply a script with the desired behaviour. > src : must be readable file > dst : file or directory > > The Makefile in xdvik doesn't give any mode parameters, so how should the > install script know that it should add the x permission? > > $(INSTALL_SCRIPT) $(srcdir)/xdvizilla $(scriptdir)/xdvizilla > $(INSTALL_SCRIPT) = install -c. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: teTeX-2.0.2 file permissions
Quoting Giuseppe Ghibò <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > George White wrote: > > > Quoting Piet van Oostrum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > > > >>xdvizilla (in tetex-src-2.0.2/texk/xdvik/) appears to be missing the x > >>permission. > > > > > > On my linux system the x-permission was set (by install -- the default is > > 755 which is why you need the -m 644 option to install documentation) when > the > > file was installed. Why does the permission in the source tree matter? > Are you > > using a funny version of install? > > > > Speaking of permissions, Mandrake's msec security tool noticed a few world > > writable files/directories in the main texmf tree: > > > > texmf/fonts/pk > > texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour > > texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/jknappen > > texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/jknappen/ec > > texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/jknappen/tc > > texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/public > > texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/public/dstroke > > texmf/ls-R > > texmf/web2c/mf.base > > texmf/web2c/mf.log > > > > which version? And are you sure is main texmf tree and not in /var/lib/texmf? > As in /var/lib/texmf to allow users to generate on the fly the PK fonts. On > main texmf tree, i.e. /usr/share/texmf there shouldn't be such files, unless > maybe you are running tex as root. Version 2.0.2, main texmf tree, installed and run from ordinary user login. In version 2.0.1, only texmf/ls-R ended up with world-write permission.
teTeX-2.0.2 file permissions
Quoting Piet van Oostrum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > xdvizilla (in tetex-src-2.0.2/texk/xdvik/) appears to be missing the x > permission. On my linux system the x-permission was set (by install -- the default is 755 which is why you need the -m 644 option to install documentation) when the file was installed. Why does the permission in the source tree matter? Are you using a funny version of install? Speaking of permissions, Mandrake's msec security tool noticed a few world writable files/directories in the main texmf tree: texmf/fonts/pk texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/jknappen texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/jknappen/ec texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/jknappen/tc texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/public texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/public/dstroke texmf/ls-R texmf/web2c/mf.base texmf/web2c/mf.log
Re: Saving counter values to .aux
Quoting David C Hendry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I'm trying to write a document which includes financial data, towards > the end I sum up various costs using a counter (\newcounter and all > that) and some simple macros. This works fine and gets me the total > costs at the end of the document. But I would like to copy the final > figure to the start of the document for a summary, and of course I'd > like this automatic (even if that means running the document through > [...] > LaTeX twice after a change). > Needless to say it does not work! The error message, with teTeX version > 2.0 (downloaded late January 2003) and compiled on Linux: > > "(./proposal.toc [1]) [2]Segmentation fault (core dumped)" What are the odds that Scott Pakin's symbols.tex has the answer to two different questions in the same week? Still, LaTeX shouldn't dump core here, and for me, with teTeX-2.0.1 on Mandrake Linux 9.0, the above construct seems to work fine. Can we see a minimal example?
Re: Context, teTeX and Times, Helvetica, Courier
On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Maarten Sneep wrote: > Hi, > > Can someone check something for me on a recent installation of teTeX (i.e. > teTeX 2.0(.1)) on some other platform than Mac OS X: > > In context I cannot get the uwr fonts to work. The following (minimalistic) > file shows the problem on Mac OS X using the distribution prepared by Gerben > Wierda. I want to figure out if it is a problem with his packaging or with > teTeX in general (I suspect the latter). This isn't a bug in teTeX, just a question of how much configuration work should be done buy the distro and what should be left to the user. I use ConTeXT with teTeX-2.0.1, but I have the font tfm's, vf's, and map files created using texfont (see mtexfont.pdf from the ConTeXt web site) with 'texnansi' encoding in texmf-local/fonts. Your example works for me if I replace 'ec' with 'texnansi' (tested on Mandrake Linux 9.0 and SGI Irix 6.5). > %% start test file. Save as "test.txt" > \starttext > \setupencoding[default=ec] > \useencoding[ec] > \setupbodyfont[pos,12pt] > \input tufte > \stoptext > %% end of the example > > Run this file with texexec (texexec --pdf test) and see if it works. On > TeXLive this works. Since this is what the author of context uses, I decided > to switch and it works fine. Since Thomas decided to include support for > context in his distribution, I think it should work on teTeX as well. The texfont documentation suggests creating a texmf-local/fonts tree for the font configuration you use, so this is a bit out-of-scope for teTeX. I haven't the time now to make sure I can actually configure the ec encoding for the URW fonts, but in principle the tools you need are there. > The fonts I'm asking for are available to LaTeX, so it is a little more > detailed than "The fonts aren't there, dude ..." It is far from easy to diagnose problems with fonts. Add to that the need to support many different encodings and the fact that many programs don't tell the truth about which fonts are actually being used. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: Which fonts are installed?
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Thomas Esser wrote: > > I have a Linux box with mandrake 9.0, which ships tetex 1.07. > > My problem is: how can I figure out which are all fonts which are > > installed/usable ? Usable for what purpose? > It would be nice to have a document wich lists the fonts and the relevant > macro packages to access them Scott Pakin's updated symbols.tex (for LaTeX) is the closest approximation that I know. This is one of the first files I compile after a new install. In contrast to the 6-page "texdoc symbols", Scott Pakin's version gives me 42 pages, (1536 symbols) for my installation of teTeX-2.0.1 together with a local texmf-fonts tree (mostly for ConTeXt). The trouble with attempts to compile lists of fonts is that there are so many different requirements that a full discussion of each font becomes a major project. Are there compatible maths glyphs with all the symbols needed in your subject area? Is the font available in scalable outline form? Are there commonly uses aliases for the font that may lead to confusion (e.g., Arial vs Helvetica vs NimbusSanL vs Swiss)? Sometimes I need to use the Acrobat Reader built-in fonts or the Laserwriter 35, other times I want to make sure that a particular font is embedded in the PDF and/or PS file. You have to consider not only what is available to TeX, but which fonts are provided by Acrobat Reader and/or the printer. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: europs.sty in 2.0(.1)
On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Thomas Esser wrote: > > is it possible that europs is missing in teTeX 2.0(.1)? g-brief 3.0 > > seems to rely on it. > > teTeX has eurosym and marvosym to support the Euro symbol. I am not > sure ig this "dependency" of g-brief to europs is intentional or a bug. > IMHO, g-brief should be happy with just one implementation for the > Euro symbol. > > As other have guessed: I don't like that europs approach as the type1 > files cannot be distributed with teTeX. Larger organizations (government, big companies) require that certain documents conform to standards, which may well include a particular font for the euro. Times-Roman, etc, aren't distributed with teTeX, but they (or some facsimile) are commonly found on many popular systems, so it makes sense that TeX support them. I'm not in a position to know how organizations across the pond support the euro, but if there is a Type 1 font that is commonly installed beside Times-Roman, then it makes sense for a new TeX to make it easy to use them. The other consideration is whether it is easier to make europs "just work" for systems that have the font or to explain why it doesn't work. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
teTeX-2.0.1 on SGI Irix 6.5 problem linking mfw, oxdvik, xdvik
With 2.0.1, configure is setting "X_LIBS" to "-L/usr/lib", which causes Irix to try to link again o32 libraries: gcc -o mfw mfini.o mf0.o mf1.o mf2.o mfextra.o window/window.a -L/usr/lib -lXt -lX11 -L/usr/lib lib/lib.a ../kpathsea/STATIC/libkpathsea.a -lm ld32: FATAL 12 : Expecting n32 objects: /usr/lib/libXt.so is o32. collect2: ld returned 4 exit status gmake[2]: *** [mfw] Error 1 gmake[2]: Leaving directory `/disk2/u/gwhite/install/tetex-src-2.0.1/texk/web2c'gmake[1]: *** [all] Error 1 gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/disk2/u/gwhite/install/tetex-src-2.0.1/texk' gmake: *** [all] Error 1 config.status for 2.0.1 has the following entries: GP.RP3$ grep '@X_LIBS' texk/*/config.status texk/oxdvik/config.status:s%@X_LIBS@% -L/usr/lib%g texk/web2c/config.status:s%@X_LIBS@% -L/usr/lib%g texk/xdvik/config.status:s%@X_LIBS@% -L/usr/lib%g It was not so for 2.0: GP.RP3$ grep '@X_LIBS' ../tetex-src-2.0/texk/*/config.status ../tetex-src-2.0/texk/oxdvik/config.status:s%@X_LIBS@%%g ../tetex-src-2.0/texk/web2c/config.status:s%@X_LIBS@%%g ../tetex-src-2.0/texk/xdvik/config.status:s%@X_LIBS@%%g Note that there is a second "-L/usr/libs" being set for mfw. A workaround is to edit the Makefiles in texk/oxdvik, etc. to remove the "-L/usr/lib" entries. -- George N. White III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 189 Parklea Dr., Head of St. Margarets Bay, NS B3Z 2G6
Re: Compiling 2.0
Quoting Daniel Büchner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Hello > Compiling 2.0 on my SuSE 8.1 crashes when working within .../texk/oxdvik > (see end of the log-file) > > What's going wrong? > > Any suggestion welcome (me - no programmer) > Thanks Daniel > > [...] > /usr/lib/libXpm.so.4: undefined reference to `_fxstat' > collect2: ld returned 1 exit status > make[2]: *** [oxdvi.bin] Fehler 1 > make[2]: Verlassen des Verzeichnisses > »/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/tetex-src-2.0/tetex-src-2.0/texk/oxdvik« > make[1]: *** [all] Fehler 1 > make[1]: Verlassen des Verzeichnisses > »/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/tetex-src-2.0/tetex-src-2.0/texk« > make: *** [all] Fehler 1 teTeX-2.0 compiles using gcc 3.2 from Mandrake 9.0. The _fxstat problem suggests that your libXpm.so.4 may be an old version linked with glibc2. On Mandrake, libXpm.so.4 is in /usr/X11R6/lib, not /usr/lib. -- George N. White III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 189 Parklea Dr., Head of St. Margarets Bay, NS B3Z 2G6 - This mail sent through Chebucto Community Net http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/
Re: How can I instruct dvips to use outline fonts instead of the CM ones?
There are outline versions of the CM fonts, but some publications and organizations insist on specific fonts. On 31 Jan 2003, David Kastrup wrote: > Giuseppe Greco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > Or if you just want to do it for one file, not as the default for > > > the full installation, just use the following flag to dvips: > > > dvips -Ppdf myfile.dvi > > > > > > or maybe (depending on what fonts you use) > > > > > > dvips -Ppdf -G0 myfile.dvi > > > > This works quite fine, but the result is not > > so good as with pdflatex... Which might mean a problem with something entirely unrelated to the fonts (e.g., wrong papersize, problems with links, etc.). > Then your font map files for dvips are not appropriate for the set of > fonts you have installed. It is very hard to know what is going on without more details. If the problem is related to fonts, then it is useful to keep track of exactly which fonts are being used. When dvips runs, it lists the font files: $ dvips -P pdf story.dvi This is dvips(k) 5.92a Copyright 2002 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com) ' TeX output 2003.01.23:1320' -> story.ps . [1] >From this we see that the Type 1 versions of cmr10, cmsl10, and cmbx10 were used. If you can get the resulting pdf file to a computer running *nix, then it is easy to check which fonts are actually used in a pdf file. $ pdffonts story.pdf name type emb sub uni object ID --- --- --- - KGIMMU+CMBX10Type 1 yes yes no 10 0 NSPLPE+CMSL10Type 1 yes yes no 13 0 ZHKQYB+CMR10 Type 1 yes yes no 16 0 When you view the file with acroread, you can also get a list of the fonts . Unfortunately, this isn't in a form that is easy to paste into email, but you should see something like: Original Font Type Used Font Type CMBX10 Type 1 Custom Embedded Subset Type 1 CMBSL10Type 1 Custom Embedded Subset Type 1 CMR10 Type 1 Custom Embedded Subset Type 1 -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
teTeX-2 rc1 glitches
1. pdftex.mk fails to use $(MAKE) texk/web2c/pdftexdir/pdftek.mk has "make" hardwired, so compilation fails on systems that need, e.g., "gmake": $ gmake world [...] cd pdftexdir && make pdftosrc.o Usage: make [...] It looks like pdftex.mk has been this way for a while, but I don't think the beta releases tried to build pdftosrc. 2. make distclean fails to remove config.cache When making for two different architectures, using "make distclean" between builds, 'libs/config.cache' and 'libs/xpdf/config.cache' did not get removed. So far I have success using gcc 3.0.4 on Irix 6.5. I tried the SGI compilers with the 20030112 beta, but need more time to find the right configure invocation to get the compiler flags set properly for my environment. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: texhash
On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Schiebel Kerstin wrote: > Hello, > > is it possible to run texhash with a specific option for one directory (e.g. > .../texmf-user) > not for the whole search path? > > Thanks > Kerstin $ texhash directory will generate the ls-R file for the specified directory. Is this what you needed? -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: Problems with teTeX on FreeBSD 4.7
On Wed, 25 Dec 2002, Gene C. Ruzicka wrote: > i've looked over the list of supported teTeX platforms at the above link, > but none of them corresponds to my platform, which is X86/cygwin . > do you support the cygwin platform, or are the cygwin people responsible > for that? Just a note of encouragement: I built a teTeX beta almost exactly 1 year ago using instructions posted on a Japanese web site (try a search for "cygwin tetex beta"). There was a minor problem with the generated Makefiles that I fixed manually, but overall the build went smoothly. The reason for building teTeX was to solve a problem one of our students was having with pdftex on a Win95 PC (the install .DLL versions didn't suit either fptex or MikTeX, and she needed to run some lab instrumentation software so it didn't make sense to risk updating DLL's just for pdftex). -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: LaTeX packages from MiKTeX ---> teTeX?
On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Richard Sperling wrote: > I've got a dual boot system, i.e., Linux/Windows 2000. I've got MiKTeX > installed on the Windows disk. Apologies if this question has been > asked/answered before, but am I correct in assuming that it's ok to take the > LaTeX packages that come with MiKTeX and install them in the requisite places > under teTeX? So there is no misunderstanding, I am only asking about LaTeX > package files per se, not the binaries, which are obviously platform > specific. Thanks. In general, this should work, but you have to watch for the odd situation where the newlines matter (e.g., some shell or perl script). There are tools that try to make intelligent conversions of newlines, but they can't always be trusted. If you want to keep teTeX tightly synchronized with MiKTeX for a small number of users this could be a reasonable thing to do. Another option would be to install texlive. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: incredibly strange problem distilling a LaTeX--based .ps file
On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Gene C. Ruzicka wrote:
> i'm not sure if this is the correct venue to raise this issue, but
> here goes:
>
> here is a trivial LaTeX document:
>
> \documentclass[10pt]{article}
> \usepackage{times}
> \begin{document}
> \begin{abstract}
> fill fill
> \end{abstract}
> fill
> \end{document}
>
> when i run this through LaTeX, and then through dvips, the .ps file looks fine
> when printed and when viewed using gsview if the LaTeX is file
> foo.tex, i generate the .ps file using: dvips foo . problems start when i
> try to distill the postscript file to a .pdf file. for that operation, i use the
> command: ps2pdf foo.ps foo.pdf . when i read (or print) foo.pdf, the fi
> ligature in the body of the document (i.e., in the word "fill"
> following the abstract) is separated by an unusually large space from
> the remaining letters. in both cases, the same .dvi file is used, so
> the problem can't originate in dvips. The problem can be fixed simply by
> removing one of the two words "fill" from the absract portion of the
> document??!! btw, the problem vanishes entirely when i remove
> \usepackage{times} from the LaTeX file.
>
> the cause of this problem seems to be the UNIX version of
> ghostscript which is ultimately invoked by the ps2pdf macro.
> on my PC at home, i have two versions of ghostscript:
> one comes with the Cygwin package, and the other is the windows
> version of ghostsscript, gswin32c. i experience the problem with
> the Cygwin ghostscript but not with gswin32c . Also, i experience
> the problem with the ghostscript on my sgi workstation at work.
>
> at first glance, this problem sounds like something i've read about
> on this list when \usepackage{times} is combined with dvips -Ppdf,
> but i don't think that's really the case.
Did you check the bug reports on sourceforge? Is this bug #524292
(present in gs7.03-7.10, but not 6.51, now marked as closed):
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=1897&atid=101897&func=detail&aid=524292
--
George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: Local texmf tree not correctly recognised
On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Roland Jesse wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I installed some local additions to the system wide texmf tree in
> ~~/texmf. In order to have latex pick that stuff up, I set $TEXMF to
> {$HOME/texmf,!!$TEXMFMAIN//,!!$TEXMFLOCAL//}. That results in:
Did you "set" TEXMF as an environment variable or by editing texmf.cnf?
> % kpsewhich -expand-var='$TEXMF'
> warning: kpathsea: variable `TEXMF' references itself (eventually).
>
>{/home/jesse/texmf,!!/tmp_mnt/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf//,!!/tmp_mnt/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local//}
I've never seen the warning message above, but if I did I'd want to know
why I was getting it. If you put the local additions after the main tree
in the TEXMF list, and then install a newer version of something that is
already present in the main tree, the version from the local tree won't be
used.
> The latter two directories are defined in the system's
> teTeX/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf.
>
> The stuff in ~/texmf/... seems to be picked up correctly. However,
> problems with other packages arise:
You get a LaTeX error -- this could occur if some old files are
being loaded from the standard texmf tree instead of the newer
files in your local tree.
> No problems arise, when I unset the TEXMF environment variable. Of
> course, the files in ~/texmf won't be picked up anymore.
>
> Any hints on what I am missing here (as well as which documentation I
> might not have read) are appreciated.
TeTex is designed so you should not need to set any environment
variables. The exception is where you need to provide multiple
configurations (e.g., someone working on a book doesn't want to
see any updates to the the packages he is using, while other
users want bug fixes). In that case, you can use TEXMFCNF to
point to a different texmf.cnf for each configuratio, e.g, setting
one variable gives you complete control over the directory search
paths for all the parts of teTeX.
Now that many vendors provide a teTeX package, it is convenient to
treat the vendor's tree as a "read-only" system and make all the
changes elsewhere. The you can upgrade the vendor package without
losing your local changes (but then you need to check that the
updated package doesn't have newer versions of some packages!).
--
George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: new dvips
On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Kalyan Mukherjea wrote: > Hi Dmitri, >Fromwhere did you download the files? Thomas had sent me the > url: > http://www.dbs.uni-hannover.de/~te/dvips5.92a/ > > On that page there are 3 links: > to Thomas's web page (Parent directory) > a dvips*.tar.gz file which contains the necessary run time files; > and > _dvips_ which is a binary compiled under SuSE linux 7.2. > > I downloaded the tar.gz file --- no hassle. But when I click > on the link _dvips_ my netscape opens a new page which fills up with > nonsense symbols typical of a binary file. I cannot get the binary > file to download as a file. > > I am sure I am doing something very silly but what should I do? > Maybe Dmitri could send me the url he went to. Most browsers have an option to download a "link target". Try clicking on the link with the "outside" button (right hand button if you have a right handed mouse). If your linux system is connected to the internet, there are command-line tools to download files such as wget. Also, text-mode browsers such as links and lynx have a "download" command. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: fmtutil.cnf not found !
On Thu, 7 Nov 2002, cudjoe wrote: > I'm running under linux debian 3.0 unstable with 2.4.19 kernel. > I try to install latex with apt. I seem to have all the required packages. > > The file exists : > # locate fmtutil.cnf > > /etc/texmf/fmtutil.cnf > /usr/share/man/man5/fmtutil.cnf.5.gz > /usr/TeX/texmf-var/web2c/fmtutil.cnf > /usr/TeX/texmf/web2c/fmtutil.cnf > /var/lib/texmf/web2c/fmtutil.cnf > > There is a problem with tetex-extra > > Sorry, tetex-extra is already the newest version. > 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. > 1 packages not fully installed or removed. > Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used. > Setting up tetex-extra (1.0.2+20011202-3) ... > texhash: Done. > Running initex for missing formats. This may take some time. ... > fmtutil: config file `fmtutil.cnf' not found. > dpkg: error processing tetex-extra (--configure): > subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1 > Errors were encountered while processing: > tetex-extra > E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) > > Where is the solution ? > > Everybody I know have succeeded without this problem ! > Is it relative to unstable distribution ? Maybe, but in any case there are ample debugging tools available to you before you can decide where the fault lies. I'd start by running texconfig manually. This does some quick sanity checks and might point to the problem right away. If not, you should systematically check that kpathsea is finding things in the right places. Have it print the values of all the relevant variables and look at the debugging logs for various searches. Can you do 'texdoc kpathsea'? -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: Font problem or not?
On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote: > George N. White III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > I find the current map file mechanism problematic, especially when using > > non-std fonts, because you can't tell from the TeX source what fonts are > > really being used. > > It is not TeX problem but final output/device dependent. For TeX we use > only .tfm files. So you can have dvips fail to find the font that corresponds to the .tfm file (missing entry) or end up with different fonts being used on different systems (e.g., Adobe vs URW, MathTime vs Belleek, etc). > If (for some reason) we have two different map files, we can always declare > them in config.ps and pdftex.cfg, respectively (p +mymap.map). You can, but if you take the file to another system or mail it to someone else, will you remember to change the .map files? If you use pdftex's ability to load map files specified in the .tex file, it is at least clear which fonts you intended to use, and it will be obvious if the required map files aren't present. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: running texconfig on a console
On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, Reinhard Kotucha wrote: > >>>>> "George" == George N White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > The "nice" menu display is done using the "dialog" utility, so > > you should check that dialog is installed and works with your > > teTeX provides its own dialog, called tcdialog, which uses its own > termcap library. Can you invoke tcdialog from the commandline? This seems to be system dependent. From TeXlive's texconfig: # Some systems have their own dialog. Use it then and do not use # faked TERM and TERMINFO variables when calling that dialog. "Some systems" appears to be defined as BSD and linux. My SGI does indeed use tcdialog. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: dvips-ing TETEXDOC.dvi
On Thu, 24 Oct 2002, Thomas Esser wrote: > That -Ppdf turn on a feature called "character shifting" and dvips is > not smart enough to detect that this does not work with all fonts. This > is fixed in newer version of dvips, but with the old version, you can > use -Ppdf -G0. It would be helpful to have a more precise definition of "newer". I have noticed that Mandrake 9.0 appears to have split their tetex 1.07 package. Although most "teTeX 1.07" systems have the older dvips, Mandrake's dvips from tetex-dvips-1.0.7-60mdk.i586.rpm does not exhibit the problem (sorry I don't recall the dvips version that worked -- it is installed on a laptop that is locked up for the night in my office). -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
Re: teTeX 1.0.7 doesn't install
On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Magnus Mager wrote: > test -f /usr/local/bin/i586-pc-linux-gnu/texconfig && \ > TEXMFMAIN=/usr/local/share/texmf > >PATH=/usr/local/bin/i586-pc-linux-gnu:/usr/local/bin/i586-pc-linux-gnu:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin > > \ > /usr/local/bin/i586-pc-linux-gnu/texconfig init > ^[[H^[[2JError opening terminal: generic. > ^[[H^[2Jmake: *** [install] Error 1 It appears that your TERM variable is set to "generic" rather than something like "xterm" or "vt100". I think this failure is in the last step of the install, where you need to do the final setup. You can try fixing the terminal settings and running "texconfig init" manually. Whenever I install a new TeX distro I always try running "latex ltxcheck" (as an ordinary user in a scratch directory) to make sure the basics are working correctly, followed by some simple things like "etex story && dvips story", "latex sample2e && dvips sample2e", etc. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: what is the font path variable?
On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Alan Tu wrote: > Hi, I'm using teTeX on Linux. I've installed an Arabic extension to laTeX. > My problem is, when I type > dvips -o current.ps current.dvi > on a console I get the right result. But when I put this command in my > crontab, current.ps is not generated. This doesn't tell us much -- does dvips run with errors or is dvips not found by the cron job? > My guess is that when jobs are executed with cron, the right path isn't set > in the environment. So my question is, in what environment variable do I > specify the path, and do I specify the path to the *.pk files in this > variable? Thanks. For a typical installation all that is needed for dvips to work properly is that the directory where it is located be listed in the PATH variable. Depending on how you add extensions, you may be using some environment variable(s), but in general it is best to make changes in the texmf.cnf file. With linux, I prefer to leave the distribution untouched (so I can just install the vendor's updates without affecting the local additions) and put local changes under the /usr/local tree. You can use a custom configuration by setting just one variable, e.g., TEXMFCNF=/usr/local/share/texmf-var/web2c You need to verify your configuration for the console and then ensure that the cron command is run with the same setting. You should read the teTeX documentation to learn how to manage teTeX's configuration. You can then write some simple cron jobs to check the settings for that environment and compare with what you got for the console. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Why VARTEXMF instead of (say) TEXMFCONFIG ?
On 30 May 2002, Michael John Downes wrote: > Thomas Esser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > [lots of good information] > > > Hope, this is helpful somehow... > > Thank you, it is very helpful. I am trying to work out some ideas for > dealing with ongoing texmf-related upgrades of various kinds on a > multi-user system and I hope to write up my thoughts pretty soon in > the form of an online article that anyone can read who wants to. But in > the process of doing this I realized that I needed to better understand > the origins and intent of some things like VARTEXFONTS and VARTEXMF. Another way to think about /var and VAR is to consider the situation where the texmf tree is read-only (on CD-ROM or a network file server shared among many users). The 'var' refers to persistant writable space (as opposed to /tmp) needed by an application. With a linux distribution it makes sense to treat the vendor-supplied TeX distribution as "read-only" so you don't have to save locally applied changes when updating or reinstalling a distribution, and so that all the workstations in a group have the same software base. On a multi-user system it is very useful to have several TeX configurations. In most cases you need one very stable configuration and others for testing patches that you don't want to inflict on all users or with different defaults (e.g., dvips map files using URW vs Adobe Type 1 fonts). A common situation is one person working on a collaboration with an outside group who needs a TeX configuration synced with that of the outside group. The TEXMFCNF variable can be used to select among multiple configurations by pointing to different web2c directories with customized texmf.cnf files. If you don't establish this policy, you will end up with users setting TEXINPUTS and other variables which makes it difficult to track down problems. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Release / status of teTeX
On Wed, 29 May 2002, Erik Frisk wrote: > Hi, > > > The -G1 option in dvips (can be activated on the commandline or in a > > config file; typically it is enabled in config.pdf) turn on a feature > > named "character shifting". This works around bugs in various other > > software, by shifting characters of a font to the "upper" area of a > > font. This works well e.g. with CM fonts, but it fails if the upper > > slots are not free in the font. > > Yes, this I have noted and have therefore commented out G in config.pdf > Which softwares has bugs that make character-switching necessary? The "bug" is the use of a zero byte to mark the end of a string in standard C strings (you lose \Gamma and math minus). Problems have been seen in early versions of Acrobat Reader, and many drawing programs that claim to import PS files. Since the native graphics API's on most common platforms use C strings, character shifting remains useful in situations where you want to import a PS file or translate it to another format. One notable exception was NeXTStep, which used Display PS and Objective-C. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Dvips and type 1 font trouble
On Tue, 21 May 2002, Gregory D. Collins wrote: > * George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [020521 21:14]: > > On Tue, 21 May 2002, Gregory D. Collins wrote: > > > > > Hello all, > > > > > > I'm having trouble with dvips and type 1 fonts. I installed Adobe > > > Garamond into my teTeX distribution, but dvips is not spitting out > > > correct postscript files; the characters in the generated output are > > > substituted by Courier. > > > > Did you install .pf[a|b] files, or just the tfm's? Are you viewing the > > file with showps or gs, or sending it to a printer? Is it a PostScript > > printer or are you rendering the file using ghostscript? > > I have installed .pfb files, along with all the files TeX needs to use > the font. (I used fontinst.sty to generate .fd, .vf, etc. files, and > afm2tfm to generate .tfm files.) The printer which I have tried to test > this on is a Postscript printer, and ghostscript (both gv and gs) fails > on it too. So the PS file is bad. I would make sure that the fonts are OK by making a file independent of ghostscript, and try changing the remapping (G) and subsetting (j) flags to dvips. > > > The strange thing is that both xdvi and pdflatex generate correct > > > output. Also, examination of the generated ps file shows that the font > > > has indeed been put into the output. Sending the .ps file to the printer > > > also shows the Courier substitution, so it's not a ghostview rendering > > > problem. > > > > Is the font embedded in the PS file or are there just references to > > the font? Dvips lists the font files it uses on the terminal. Type 1 > > fonts can be installed as "printer-resident" or downloaded with the > > PS file. If your dvips configuration assumes that the font is > > resident when it should be downloaded you will get Courier. > > The font is embedded in the file. When I dvips the .dvi file, dvips > lists the font files on the command line. For instance: > > phd5.cs.yale.edu [5]> dvips -o test.ps test.dvi > This is dvips(k) 5.86 Copyright 1999 Radical Eye Software > (www.radicaleye.com) > ' TeX output 2002.05.21:1403' -> test.ps > <8r.enc>. > [1] Hmm. My texlive smapshot has: This is dvips(k) 5.86g Copyright 2001 Radical Eye Software [...] Maybe an older dvips got into your path. > Here "padr8a.pfb" and "padri8a.pfb" are obviously the Adobe Garamond > font files. > > > > I've upgraded Ghostview to the lates GNU version, and upgraded teTeX to > > > the latest snapshot (20020402), to no avail. Any suggestions? > > > > Divide and conquer. What happens if you use A-Garamond in a PS file > > created with something other than TeX? Ghostscript has some sample > > files to print a font table that you can edit (prfont.ps?) to > > see if ghostscript can find the font. There are too many ways to > > I have not really tried this, but since the font (should be?) is > embedded in the .ps file, I would assume that Ghostscript would not need > a local copy. Again, the funny part is that pdflatex (using the same > pda.map file, which I included in the "updmap" script) finds the font > and embeds it in the .pdf files perfectly well. Indeed, when I print the > PDF file, the document goes to the printer and looks great, but I would > rather not use the Acrobat reader every time I want to print one of > these files. This really points at a problem with dvips -- either an old (buggy) version that got onto your path or perhaps a compiler bug affecting your installation. I tend to avoid .dvi files. Dvips is a bit fragile (it is so easy to mess up the configuration) and it does not produce resolution independent PS files. Acroread has coomand-line parameters to print, and there is ps2pdf (ghostscript) and pdftops (xpdf). > Any light anyone can shed on this would be appreciated. > > Cheers, > G. I have AGaramond, but just haven't gotten around to configuring it on my system (it is used here for a report series). I'll try to get to it "real soon now" and let you know what happens. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Dvips and type 1 font trouble
On Tue, 21 May 2002, Gregory D. Collins wrote: > Hello all, > > I'm having trouble with dvips and type 1 fonts. I installed Adobe > Garamond into my teTeX distribution, but dvips is not spitting out > correct postscript files; the characters in the generated output are > substituted by Courier. Did you install .pf[a|b] files, or just the tfm's? Are you viewing the file with showps or gs, or sending it to a printer? Is it a PostScript printer or are you rendering the file using ghostscript? > The strange thing is that both xdvi and pdflatex generate correct > output. Also, examination of the generated ps file shows that the font > has indeed been put into the output. Sending the .ps file to the printer > also shows the Courier substitution, so it's not a ghostview rendering > problem. Is the font embedded in the PS file or are there just references to the font? Dvips lists the font files it uses on the terminal. Type 1 fonts can be installed as "printer-resident" or downloaded with the PS file. If your dvips configuration assumes that the font is resident when it should be downloaded you will get Courier. > I've upgraded Ghostview to the lates GNU version, and upgraded teTeX to > the latest snapshot (20020402), to no avail. Any suggestions? Divide and conquer. What happens if you use A-Garamond in a PS file created with something other than TeX? Ghostscript has some sample files to print a font table that you can edit (prfont.ps?) to see if ghostscript can find the font. There are too many ways to misconfigure dvips so it reads the wrong configuration files and it is easy to make a mistake in the configuration files. The debugging option can be used to see exactly which files are being used. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: question about adding packages and fonts
On Tue, 21 May 2002, Christopher Pinon wrote: > I'm new to teTeX but have used LaTeX on another platform. I'm getting > ready to migrate to teTeX for full-time use and have a couple of questions > about adding packages and fonts, and even updating LaTeX, in teTeX. If I > understand well, I should preferably add local packages and fonts to a new > texmf-tree and make Kpathsea aware of this tree. Is there a generally > preferred location for such a new texmf-tree, or does everyone just choose > a place that s/he likes best? When it comes to updating LaTeX itself, am I > right to assume that I should overwrite the standard texmf-tree? In > principle, I guess, I could also add a new LaTeX version to my new > texmf-tree, but this seems less efficient. (I'm using teTeX 1.0.6 from > Debian Potato.) Some people have $HOME/texmf, others make a /usr/local[/share]/texmf. You may also want to have a texmf-fonts directory as suggested in some recent ConTeXt docs. Most people either use the names in the default texmf.cnf or edit that file to match their own preferences. If you expect to install updated linux distributions, you may want to leave the distribution "as is", and make all the changes in your own tree[s] so you don't loose any changes when you update the distribution (or change to a different linux distribution). You can do this by putting your edited copy of texmf.cnf in a place you choose and setting the TEXMFCNF environment variable. This can be helpful in troubleshooting because you can easily revert to the original distributed configuration by unsetting TEXMFCNF. A disadvantage is that you could end up using outdated versions of packages you installed after updating your distribution. There is nothing magic about latex -- as long as you understand how latex finds files you can make sure that you are using any update that you install. With kpathsea there isn't a significant runtime penalty to having multiple trees with old and new versions of latex, and the disk space required for a latex distribution is rarely a concern these days. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: inverting ps/pdf
On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, Kalyan Mukherjea wrote: > Hi, > To resume (briefly) an off-topic query that has elicited a > number of responses (George White, Krzysztof Leszczynski amongst > them)--- I had asked of the possibility of a reverse video switch > (similar in function to the one in xdvi) for ps and pdf readers. Just to refresh people's memories, the original query was for an inverse (white on black) viewing mode which is helpful for certain visual impairments and other situations where a light background can create excessive illumination (in case you ever need to view a PDF file during a blackout!). > George had suggested I contact the author of Xpdf --- a > program I was not aware of. Thanks George! I contacted Derek Noonberg > and within 3 days he sent me a patch to do this. In fact this will be > a feature of xpdf-1.01 which Derek plans to release soon. Maybe I > should also contact the author of gv (but who is he?) or can one > convert ps to pdf? Xpdf has a pdftops utility but not vice-versa. Ghostscript has a ps2pdf script which uses the 'pdfwrite' device. The pdfwrite device has been improving rapidly, so you want to use a recent version of ghostscript (7.04), but if the PS were created files with TeX and dvips, there is a bug that was only recently fixed in dvips (http://tomas.rokicki.com/gpatch.diff) that can produce incorrect glyphs when using Adobe fonts and the '-G' option in dvips. I highly recommend using the README file accompanying testflow.tex: CTAN:tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/IEEEtran/testflow/ to make sure your (La)TeX, dvips, and ps2pdf are configured properly, but of couse this won't help if you download a PS file created with an older version of dvips. > Finally --- thanks to all the people of the Free software community > for their unfailing courtesy, patience and willingness to help those > who need help. > > Kalyan It is nice to hear that things worked out well. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Avoiding dvi files
On Sun, 24 Mar 2002, Helen McCall wrote: > Having long hated Postscript hacking, I would like to use pdf in my > programming as well if it is easier. I have the set of Adobe Postscript > [...] For a TeX-based workflow, metapost is worth considering. Metapost PS files are already "flattened" and can be translated to PDF without the need for a full PS interpreter. Hans Hagen has written TeX macros to handle this. His "Metafun" manual gives lots of examples (using ConTeXt). It is also worth noting that PDF pages are essentially Illustrator, so in principle you could write a macro package to handle Illustrator PS files. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: PDFLATEX version
On Sat, 19 Jan 2002, Reinhard Kotucha wrote: > >>>>> "George" == George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > It isn't hard to install a newer pdftex from source. You can > > either replace your current versions or put the updated versions > > in a new place (e.g., /usr/local). > > I doubt that this works. The reason is that both, the old and the new > version will search for *tex.pool. TeX is not designed for dealing > with different versions to be installed at the same time. If you have two versions of TeX installed in different places, you can switch between them by changing the executable search path. The default is to find texmf.cnf relative to the binaries, so if you install under /usr/local and add the binaries directory to your PATH variable you will end up using the correct pool files. If you want to go back to the old configuration (e.g., because you have a large document that would need changes to work with the new version) you just set the PATH variable back. You can also set TEXMFCNF to override the default (e.g., if you want to use pdftex installed in a non-standard location, but keep the other binaries from an earlier installation). -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: PDFLATEX version
On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Mancini Stephane wrote: > Hi, > How can I upgrade the pdflatex of the tetex distribution. > I use tetex-1.0.7-35mdk.i586.rpm from Mandrake. > > pdflatex is 13d and I need 14h (or newer) to > use the pdfpages package. > > Do I need to do it by myself ? and how ? > Or is it scheduled ? It isn't hard to install a newer pdftex from source. You can either replace your current versions or put the updated versions in a new place (e.g., /usr/local). You might want to get the 20011202 beta version of teTeX and install the whole thing -- I've been using it a bit on both Cygwin and SGI Irix without problems, and last night I installed it on my home Mandrake system without difficulty (but haven't tested it beyond building the formats, so there could be some bugs). -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: dvips(k) 5.86 Utility
Your new version of dvips is configured for A4 paper. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: [Q] searching for psfonts.map
On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Didier Verna wrote: >But how do you generate good quality PS then ? Is pdf2ps better ? In the past, we needed good quality PS for typesetters, but these days we get the best results when we send PDF's to the typesetter. In particular, there are tools that work very well with RGB PDF's. The only time we need high quality PS is for EPS figures and images when a 3rd party does the typesetting, and these we provide in Illstrator or Photoshop format. Pdf2ps output is not resolution dependent. There are a few situations where this could cause artifacts for low resolution devices, but if you have pdf this may not be important. There are many tools to get PS from pdf (pdftops from xpdf, acrobat reader, ghostscript, Illustrator, etc.), so you should be able to find one that suits your requirements. If not, pdf2ps and pdftops are both open source and can be modified to do what you need. Ghostscript has a number of PS to PS tools (epswrite, ps2ai.ps) that can be used to fix problem PS files. In particular, ps2ai.ps is easily modified to fix specific problems. When you really need good PS (e.g., for distiller) from .dvi, Y&Y's dvipsone is the best tool, but it is commercial and runs on Win32. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: TeTeX on Redhat and shared texmf TeXLive 6
On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Graham Gough wrote: > > This correspondence has prompted me to write on a topic that has > concerned me for a while. > > Our department's main teaching and research computing resource is now > provided by a network of Linux machines, running Red Hat, each of > which has local copies of as much software as possible. We keep them > up to date by using rpms to update the local copies. This means that > they are now running the version of teTeX available in the > tetex-*-1.0.6-11 series of rpms, which are now quite old. Updating > such a large number of machines without the necessary rpms does not > appear to be an option. It would appear that, to keep teTeX reasonably > current, we need to switch to a single, centrally maintained copy. Do > others have the same problems, or any bright ideas to solve them? > > Thanks > > Graham There is a middle ground between keeping systems at a common readily available level (e.g., the vendor RPM's for your Linux distro) and providing access to current packages. You can use the TEXMFCNF variable to point to a localized texmf/web2c directory with the .fmt and .pool files, and maintain a local texmf tree for newer versions and additions to the vendor supplied tree. This local stuff can be NFS mounted, with the result that most of the files will still come from the vendor tree, or copied to the local machines if NFS performance is a problem. It can be useful to have access to the vendor-supplied configurations because so many people at other sites are using them. It is also useful to be able to test updates via a texmf-test/web2c directory before putting them on all your systems. Unfortunately, there are some issues that go beyond the texmf tree. Many TeX documents use the "laserwriter 35" fonts, which in practice means the URW clones from ghostscript. My Mandrake 7.1 Linux distro provides older versions of these fonts than the SGI freeware distro at work, but the texmf trees on both systems have the old versions. On Mandrake 7.1 linux the old URW fonts are used by xfs and ghostscript (e.g., to print on a non-PS printer), so just updating the texmf tree doesn't solve the problem. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: embedding times for distilling to pdf
On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, gijs van soest wrote: > Yep, that did it. It's just that (it turns out) on our system there are > not the Adobe pfb's but the URW ones, which are called Nimbus, for some > reason, but look the same. Inclusion of a file named > acrobat-std-urw-kb.map in the config works (this lowly user unfortunately > can't edit+run updmap :-( ) > Thanx, Gijs. You should be aware that the URW fonts are not exactly the same as the Adobe fonts. If you are embedding them, however, you will avoid the problems that arise when different versions of Adobe Acrobat supply different fonts (e.g., Arial or Helvetica). We have been burned because some glyphs, e.g., vert. bar (|) and forward slash (/) can be confused when Helvetica-Oblique (a synthetic font) or the URW "clone" is substituted for Arial-Italic (a real font). There are ways for a user to modify the system configuration. If you examine the texmf.cnf file you may find that it supports a user TEXMF tree that is searched before the system tree (e.g., ~/texmf). Failing that, you may be able to use your own texmf.cnf by setting the TEXMFCNF variable (see the documentation). -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: teTeX releases
On Fri, 25 May 2001, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote: > I know the question I am about to ask is one rarely answered, and for > excellent reasons - but I ask it anyway: > > Is there a new teTeX release underway anytime soon? > > The present stable release is getting quite old. We certainly need > amslatex version 2, for example. I also have the impression that > pdftex has been improved quite a bit lately, and it would be nice to > have a recent version of it. OTOH, you almost certainly have users who expect to be able to regenerate documents written with the old version after minor changes (e.g., final corrections for publication). There is a huge difference between updating a TeX macro package and installing new binaries. If your TeX system is working properly, you should be able to update the macro packages without making changes to the underlying system. Unless you are on a "free" OS, building or installing new binaries usually involves asking the boss to pay for an OS or compiler upgrade. > Now please don't get me wrong: I appreciate the ease and convenience > of installing teTeX, and I also appreciate the longish interval > between releases, which helps to diminish the pressure to always > upgrade to the latest version. But with more than a year since the > previous release I think maybe the time is ripe for another stable > release. (Perhaps after the next LaTeX release, unless June 1 arrives > very late this year?) What new capabilities should be present to make teTeX 2 worthwhile? I'm hoping that we will be able to get by without PK fonts and use PDF extensively. I'm not sure we can do without the EC fonts yet, and Acrobat 5 seems to require a whole new array of workarounds to get past Adobe's inability to learn from past mistakes -- or is the TeX community wrong in expecting Acrobat 5 to include bug fixes from earlier versions? PDF is still very much of a moving target, so anyone who wants to work with PDF needs to be in a position to upgrade early and often. > If a new stable release is not very likely to happen soon, I'll > consider the latest beta instead. What experiences do people have > with the beta releases? And do they track stuff like amslatex and > pdftex well? My dilemma here is twofold: I maintain teTeX on umpteen > architectures for our entire university, so I cannot afford a high > risk of mistakes (an argument in favour of stable releases). And I > basically only have the time for major upgrades during the summer > months, which may be difficult to synchronize with stable releases (an > argument in favour of beta releases). The only way we can ever get rid of a TeX distribution is to kill off the machine it lives on. Most users learn to work with the quirks of a particular distribution and don't want anything to change. When they are forced to move to a new system they are generally willing to consider moving to a newer (stable) TeX distribution. > Any insight, wisdom, or (gasp!) actual information will be very > welcome indeed. It is not difficult to layer updates "on top of" the current stable teTeX by creating additional texmf trees, each with a web2c/texmf.cnf file. We have done this for the SGI freeware distribution of teTeX with relatively little pain. To use the updated version users have only to adjust their PATH and set TEXMFCNF. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: URW fonts
On Tue, 1 May 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > [...] > There are still a lot of people around, particularly in the so-called > Third World, who are happily running TeX on ancient machines. Yes, but are any of them using the current version of teTeX with pdftex and ghostscript? > "Giuseppe Ghibo'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > > > > How about a revision of the 8+3 KB naming scheme to support more > > characters for more prosaic font names? WDYT? > > If a system isn't broken, don't fix it. The system _is_ broken in the sense that using a current TeX with type 1 fonts requires too many font information tables, making it difficult to understand and maintain. Since teTeX runs on X and is commonly used with a PS interpreter, you also have to reconcile the X font names and provide the font to file mapping for the PS interpreter. When you encounter a problem it is often difficult to figure out which file needs to be changed. There are many situations where it would be useful to be able to switch between families (e.g., the original Adobe base 13 fonts as used by Display PS and Acrobat Reader 3 vs the modified base 13 fonts as used by Acrobat Reader 4 or the Adobe "laserwriter 35" vs the URW "clones" of these fonts), or even to know with certainty which of these are actually being used (since many systems try to be helpful and "automatically" substitute fonts without telling us). The current font situation is a mess, and really needs a complete overhaul. In a well designed system, the actual names of the font files on disk will appear in exactly one table, and could easily accomodate a variety of naming schemes. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: pdflatex vs. latex | dvips | ps2pdf
On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Clemens Ballarin wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > > Certainly ps2pdf can make good use of Type 1 fonts, so I don't understand > > your comment. Also, there are have been many changes to ghostscript, > > which is now at version 7.0, including many improvements to the pdfwrite > > device, so bad experiences with some previous version may no longer apply. > > The version that comes with tetex only deals with Type 1 fonts for postscript > standard fonts. It seems to convert latex Type 1 fonts to bitmaps. This is > seconded by ps2pdf's man page: AFAIK, teTeX doesn't include ghostscript. Many linux distributions provide an older version of ghostscript (e.g., 5.50) , but if you want to work with pdf you are well advised to get ver. 7.0. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: pdflatex vs. latex | dvips | ps2pdf
On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Clemens Ballarin wrote: > Thanks for the help on getting dvips to use type 1 fonts! > > It turns out that ps2pdf doesn't take advantage of those fonts. So I > now use Acrobat's Distiller, which does an excellent job in creating > both small and high quality pdf files. > > Clemens Certainly ps2pdf can make good use of Type 1 fonts, so I don't understand your comment. Also, there are have been many changes to ghostscript, which is now at version 7.0, including many improvements to the pdfwrite device, so bad experiences with some previous version may no longer apply. Distiller is certainly more robust than pdfwrite, but a) distiller is not available for many platforms that can run teTeX, b) many people have tight budgets and would prefer to spend their funds in other ways, and c) it is often much easier to supply student labs with "free" software than it is to administer commercial licenses. Even those who have access to distiller should periodically check for problems with pdfwrite and file bug reports as required. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: WG: japan pictures (fwd)
On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Frank Mittelbach wrote: > Martin, > > > Frank: Iris is the one I asked about a telephone glyph in latex years > > ago, while hacking my resume. > > [...] > > I'm now thinking that, much as I love that telephone symbol, and as > > much as I enjoyed this hacking session, I'd better keep my document > > portable and viewable and printable, so I'd better leave it out. > > wrong. it is portable and viewable only that somehow we have to get proper > distributions again. > > i would recomment you to get you something like texlive which you can > run from the CD if you like and which does give you a proper system > (based on tetex) > > that's what i use on various platforms these days without trouble, eg > hpux solaris linux win2000 win9x ... We have to find a way to deal with the different names used in the X windows fonts/Type1/fonts.scale for ZapfDingbats. Xpdf has the name hardcoded. I guess we need yet another font map file to map Adobe PDF font names to the ones used in a particular vendor's X server configuration. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: japan pictures
On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Martin Buchholz wrote: > >>>>> "T" == Thomas Esser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > >> (martin@polgar) ~/i/resume $ xdvi tel.dvi > >> kpathsea: Running mktexpk --mfmode ljfour --bdpi 600 --mag 1+0/600 --dpi 600 pzdr > >> mktexpk: Running gsftopk pzdr 600 > >> gsftopk(k) version 1.17 > >> gs: No such file or directory > > T> You can set up mktexpk to use ps2pk instead of gsftopk (just look at > T> texmf/web2c/mktex.cnf). That way, you do not need gs. Or, install gs. > > Indeed, when used on a system with gs installed, xdvi does work. This > is reasonable. gsftopk might give a more explanatory error message > (as a naive user I don't understand why xdvi might need to invoke > ghostscript). > > >> Amazingly, this actually succeeded in printing a real telephone glyph! > > T> :-) > > >> But it shouldn't be this hard. Unfortunately, your experience is all too common. For many people, getting teTeX to work seems to be very painful. As a result, they become reluctant to make changes to their system. This means they don't install improved versions, bug fixes, etc. (or they give up on unix and buy Windows NT with Y&Y TeX!). > T> Well, for me, it just works. One problem is that you are using a > T> PostScript font without the "default" program that people use to handle > T> PostScript (gs + gv). The other way (ps2pk + xdvi) was not known to > T> you... :-( > > T> Of course, ps2pk *is* mentioned in TETEXDOC. The .pk fonts are a major headache. Ghostscript is rather fragile, in part because users are forever tweaking environment variables to change font paths, etc. (e.g., to switch between URW and Adobe versions of the lw35 fonts, add Japanese, ...). If you let users generate them you have problems of world writable directories, etc. Now that xdvi has a type1 rasterizer and we have some decent free fonts that support LY1 encodings, it may be possible for many people to live happily without ever using .pk fonts. If you are using Type 1 fonts, pdf may be less problematic. I ran pdflatex on the sample file. Xpdf on SGI Irix gave: Error: Failed to open font: '-*-zapfdingbats-medium-r-normal-*-11-*-*-*-*-*-*-*' Acrobat reader does work, as did gs. > But TETEXDOC is not mentioned on the teTeX Home Page. I'll go read it > now. > > Like many TeX users, I have one TeX document (my resume) which I > update every year or two. So I don't want to spend hours learning. > I already have my own buggy free software to maintain. If you are going to use TeX at all, you may find it better in the long run to use it for everything so that you keep your skills current and can rely on it in a crunch. Otherwise you may end up like the sad people who wander the halls looking for a way to load their old WordStar files that won't import into their copy of MS Office. The TeX files I created using WordStar on a CPM system will still work with today's teTeX, but many documents I created with the proprietary word processor du jour are lost forever. > teTeX was really easy to install - thank you - You've put together a > great distribution. I especially like the way that the distribution > can be installed in any directory. > > Perhaps ghostscript and ghostview should be included in the > distribution. My memories of the last time I built these programs > years ago were not altogether pleasant. This has been discussed before. A central problem is that the current version is not GPL'd, and many teTeX users do need (in fact, help to create) the new features. On some systems (SGI) DPS is provided, so not everyone needs gs. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: PDF problems
On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Gary Taylor wrote: > Hi, > > I am not sure if this is only a teTeX problem. > > However, after I have converted a teTeX dvips generated postscript file > to pdf using the ghostscript-5.50 ps2pdf on a UNIX platform or same the > ghostscript-5.10 facility on an NT platform, I then have difficulties > printing the pdf file from acroread 4.0. Gs6.50 has a much improved pdfwrite device. > There is always a time out error on the documents after say 6-8 pages of > a 20 page document. The print job is unfinished and the diagnostics are > printed at the end and usually refer to the stack and/or an unrecognised > command. I've encountered a number of PDF documents that I could not print in one go, but did print in batches of 20 pages. In some cases PDF files that won't print using a PS driver will print on the same printer using the PCL driver (e.g, HP Laserjet printers). I have problems with files created using pdftex, gs6.50, and distiller. All the files can be viewed reliably using acroread or gs. Since our level 3 printer is dye-sub, I haven't tested big files with it. My best guess is that there is some resource problem with our level2 printers that might improve if we install more memory. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Ä in dvi file
On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Ronald Warner wrote: > I am tetex-1.0.6-11 that came with redhat6.2. after running tex, I > would see Ä ( A with the two dots over it) in the dvi file though it is > not in the tex file. We have already studied the tex files but we > didn't see anything wrong with it. Perhaps it is in the tex config, > but I am not a regular tex user. How would I solve this problem? > > thanks. One way to get odd stray characters in a .dvi file is to "\input" a file that a) has been edited with a DOS program that puts a ^Z (ASCII 0x1a, which is the "ae" ligature in many TeX fonts) character in to mark "end-of-file", and b) lacks a \endinput line Is there an encoding that maps 0x1a to Adieresis? Sometimes a file will get corrupted, e.g., after being sent thru email or edited via a modem session. To track down the source of such problems you need to narrow down the search by throwing out \input files and chunks of the document until the problem goes away. At this point in time quite a few people are migrating from DOS or OS/2 to Linux and teTeX, so the "ae" problem is sufficiently common that it probably should be the teTeX FAQ if it isn't already. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: ConTeXt formats
On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, Hans Hagen wrote:
> At 07:02 PM 9/19/00 -0300, George White wrote:
> >Note: this thread started out as a discussion of whether the ConTeXt
> >formats should be enabled by default in teTeX. Behind this is an
> >underlying concern that many system administrators will only support
> >the default, so if a user wants ConTeXt they will have to create their
> >own texmf directory tree (this is, in fact, the situation where I work).
>
> it would safe me some mails if at least the dutch and english formats were
> generated, since they are also used by postprocessing pdf docs with
> texexec, which is useful for latex/plain users too
Certainly a major factor in the decision of whether to enable ConTeXt
formats is the impact on the workload of the key contributers. Certainly
too, ConTeXt is close to the (well deserved) status of an essential TeX
format, i.e., one that people expect to have available. If the ConTeXt
formats are enabled in teTeX, the emails asking how to get it working will
be replaced by emails asking why it doesn't work as expected. The trick
is to organize things in a way that helps shape user expectations to
realistic levels.
> >It would be nice to see ConTeXt used by more people, but I am concerned
> >that if it becomes as readily available as plain tex then people will
> >assume that it has a similar license, and as a result, violate the license
> >unintentionally. This implies extra workload for TeX gurus who will then
> >have to explain to these users that they have to purchase table.tex and
> >Lucida fonts in order to compile a document that they brought with them
> >from their previous school or obtained from a colleague.
>
> The plain licence is rather restrictive -)
>
> Just to repeat: you don't have to buy anything, table is as free as pictex,
> but for both the manuals are sold, but not needed. Also, there are already
> two replacements for tables in context [three mechanisms now] so people can
> avoid table when in doubt.
It should be relatively easy to provide an informative message when a
ConTeXt user tries to use "table.tex" -- perhaps just a dummy file that
prints a warning message "You are attempting to use the table.tex package,
which does not appear to be properly installed on your system. See ..."
> Concerning lucida, there are free versions, but in general, people don't
> need them. The fact that i default to them in some of the presentation
> styles is history. I can change that if needed. Also,
>
> \definefilesynonym[font-lbr][font-cmr] % or [font-pos]
>
> will map all lucida defs to computer modern or 15 ps fonts,
>
> there is really no problem there.
Appearances will suffer if you just do a straight replacement of lbr with
cmr or pos.
The problem is that the user doesn't get helpful feedback if they try to
use lbr under the impression that it should work. It would be better if
the system can be organized so that anyone who trys the presentation
styles or the pdftex manual and doesn't have Lucida fonts will get a
helpful explanation at the earliest possible stage.
The "missing commercial fonts" problem occurs quite frequently with LaTeX,
and is going to get messier as more people try to use Belleek, LucidaSO,
or other free, but more limited, substitutes for commercial font packages
(since users will encounter documents that were generated without error
but don't display as expected).
Updmap could warn of missing font files as it processes the maps, but
there is still a big difference between TeX and pdfTeX. Some people
happily create .dvi files that use fonts they don't have, and switch to a
system that has the fonts when they need hardcopy. Maybe updmap can have
a flag that controls whether the generated map files can refer to missing
fonts.
Rather than the current "invisible" substitutions that are used for
Belleek, the substitutions be made "explicit" as in
\usepackage[belleek]{mathtime}.
In my experience, many ConTeXt early adopters do have both table.tex and
the Lucida fonts from Y&Y, so new users and users new to teTeX both stand
a good chance of encountering documents that use these.
> Hans
> -
> Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
> Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
> tel: +31 (0)38 477 53 69 | fax: +31 (0)38 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
> -
>
--
George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: ConTeXt formats
Note: this thread started out as a discussion of whether the ConTeXt formats should be enabled by default in teTeX. Behind this is an underlying concern that many system administrators will only support the default, so if a user wants ConTeXt they will have to create their own texmf directory tree (this is, in fact, the situation where I work). I think some other distributions (4TeX 5?) either enable ConTeXt by default or at least make it quite easy for users to enable ConTeXt thru a configuration menu. On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, Thomas Esser wrote: > Dear George, > > > 1) ConTeXt requires the table macro package, which AFAIK is not free, viz. > > licen-en.pdf > > > > [3.5] This licence does not apply to components of the official version > > that are provided by third parties. > > > > 2) The license says the sources are GPL's, but adds constraints on how you > > can use ConTeXt, viz > > > > [5.3] Because the manuals provided by Pragma ADE are also examples of what > > can be done by ConTeXt, their layout is bound to these documents. In > > large this also applies to the whole ConTeXt demonstration suite. > > Additional, third party documentation, therefore may not use the same > > layout characteristics, like graphics (and tricks), unless permission is > > granted. > > I know Hans very well and the change from the old very restrictive > license to the better GPL was mostly triggered by discussions that I > had with Hans. I am quite sure that if you tell Hans that his license > has contradictions and unacceptable restrictions (from the free software > point of view), he'll most propably change that. I don't think there is anything wrong with the ConTeXt license. From my viewpoint, the two practical issues are a) third party ingredients such as the Lucida fonts and table.tex, and b) the entirely reasonable desire to preserve rights to _designs_ of documents created with ConTeXt. Hans has no control over third party licenses, so I can't fault him there. In the past, most TeX documents have tried to achieve uniformity of design, and have not attempted to be innovative. Now we are starting to see TeX used in innovative ways. Particularly in the case of ConTeXt, where innovative designs are likely to be tightly coupled to ConTeXt macros (for which we have the sources!), it may not be hard to mimic a design. I'm all in favor of innovation, and the ConTeXt license encourages that by making the tools open (as opposed to keeping them a trade secret) and then asking that you not just copy designs without getting permission, which might encourage some people to make their own designs. > It seems like you understand the current Context licence better than me. > Would you please be so kind to get in touch with Hans and discuss this > with him? > > Thomas It would be nice to see ConTeXt used by more people, but I am concerned that if it becomes as readily available as plain tex then people will assume that it has a similar license, and as a result, violate the license unintentionally. This implies extra workload for TeX gurus who will then have to explain to these users that they have to purchase table.tex and Lucida fonts in order to compile a document that they brought with them from their previous school or obtained from a colleague. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: ConTeXt formats
On 18 Sep 2000, Ed L Cashin wrote: > George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > ... > > There are some restrictions in the ConTeXt license, so it is > > probably better to require that someone (presumably one who has read > > the documentation!) has to explicitly enable ConTeXt. > > You may want to check that. I don't think that is why the formats are > commented out. ConTeXt's license is the GNU Public License: > > public version > > [3.1] The most recent stable version of ConTEXt is available as >free software under the conditions of the gnu general >public licence. > > [3.2] This public version can be considered to be the `official >public ConTEXt distribution'. > -- > --Ed Cashin PGP public key: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.coe.uga.edu/~ecashin/pgp/ 1) ConTeXt requires the table macro package, which AFAIK is not free, viz. licen-en.pdf [3.5] This licence does not apply to components of the official version that are provided by third parties. 2) The license says the sources are GPL's, but adds constraints on how you can use ConTeXt, viz [5.3] Because the manuals provided by Pragma ADE are also examples of what can be done by ConTeXt, their layout is bound to these documents. In large this also applies to the whole ConTeXt demonstration suite. Additional, third party documentation, therefore may not use the same layout characteristics, like graphics (and tricks), unless permission is granted. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: ConTeXt formats
On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Thomas Esser wrote: > > Is there a reason why the context formats are commented out in the > > fmtutil.cnf file? I'm sure that uncommenting it in the tetex > > Yes. I restrict teTeX to the formats which I consider "basic". These are > plain and latex. I might change my view with respect of context so day... > > Thomas There are some restrictions in the ConTeXt license, so it is probably better to require that someone (presumably one who has read the documentation!) has to explicitly enable ConTeXt. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: mathtime problem
On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:
> [...]
> In the real world, however, maintainers of free software usually have
> plenty more important things to do, so the above should not be
> construed as criticism. Maybe rather something to put on the bottom
> of an infinitely long todo list?
>
> Of course, an easier way (for maintainers) to deal with the problem is
> to remove packages such as mathtime from the standard distribution,
> thus forcing those who paid for the fonts to take a minute or two to
> download the necessary support files.
A consistently organized package such as teTeX makes it much easier
to create add-on packages that will install easily. It is better
for maintainers to concentrate on core functions.
Where things get a bit complicated is keeping track of free clones
of commercial packages like MathTime. Similar issues occur for
the URW clones of Adobe Type1 fonts. I would like to see more
explicit indications when such substitutions occur, for example,
a MathTime package with a Belleek option (e.g.,
\usepackage[belleek]{mathtime} or \usepackage[urw]{pslatex}).
--
George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: mathtime problem
On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Thomas Ruedas wrote: > >> Cannot find font file mtsyn.pfb > :-( > >Mathtime fonts are commercial (get them e.g. from Y&Y). Alternatives: > > - mathptm(x) (uses free replacements from e.g. Symbol font; incomplete) > Thanks. However, they look as ugly as sin (upright greek letters). After > seeing that, I rather stick to CM for math mode. There is also the (new) MathPazo font set that provides some math symbols for use with Palatino. The new psnfss makes some improvements in the LaTeX (2e) support for Type1 fonts, now you can use "mathptmx". -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: \usepackage{times} and dvips -Ppdf
On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Rex Dieter wrote:
> I have found in tetex 1.0.6 (redhat linux 6.2) what appears to be a bug in
> the interaction between the times latex package (\usepackage{times}) and
> using dvips with the -Ppdf commandline switch.
Other packages are affected: mathpazo and mathtime, for example. The
comments in config.pdf indicate it is intended for use with the type 1
cm fonts.
> Certain (all?) ligatures such as ff, fi, fl get mapped incorrectly, and
> resulting postscript files (or pdf files created from them) show these items
> wrong.
>
> I found that by modifying /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/config.pdf
> by removing/commenting-out the section referrring to "Character shifting"
> % G
>
> Is this indeed a bug/problem?
It is certainly a problem for users who get incorrect output after
using "-P pdf". As I recall, character shifting was introduced
because not all tools handle characters incoded as ASCII "control"
characters (especially ASCII NUL). Is this still a real problem,
or have the tools improved to the point that character shifting is
no longer necessary?
> Is the fix I made to config.pdf correct or a bad idea?
If character shifting is needed it should be configured on a font-by-font
basis. Perhaps there should be a list of fonts to which shifting will be
applied when the option is set for dvips. This is really a dvips issue.
> --
> Rex Dieter
> Computer System Administrator
> Mathematics and Statistics
> University of Nebraska Lincoln
--
George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Problem with pdftex in teTeX 1.0 distribution ?? (Very long)
On Wed, 5 Jul 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Dear teTeX Community, > > Short Version: > I suspect that there is a problem with the pdftex in the teTeX 1.0 binary > distribution for PPC AIX 4.2. > As evidence, I offer the output from > # fmtutil --byfmt pdflatex > /usr/local/bin/fmtutil: 28916 Memory fault: A memory image file is created > as "core". > fmtutil: `pdftex -ini -fmt=pdflatex -progname=pdflatex pdflatex.ini' > failed. A stack trace from this core file might be helpful, but if everything else is working you will probably be better off with a more recent pdftex version -- see below. > [...] > > The only other thing I can think of is to attach texmf.cnf to this mail, > but it's long and I did not modify it at all, so I won't do that. > > So, I hope that I've included enough information to allow you clever people > to deduce what is going wrong. > > If you think that the solution is to recompile pdftex with a patch, I have > gcc 2.95.2, and would be willing to upload the resulting binary if you > wanted it. > I can also do other small debugging tasks, if it would lead to a faster > resolution of this problem. Thanks for your patience. (You > deserve thanks if you made it to here.) > > Regards, > > Peter Dulimov. Pdftex is a problem, as it has been evolving rapidly. The version of pdftex (13d) in teTeX 1.0 should probably be updated even on systems where it runs. Look in: ftp://ftp.muni.cz/pub/tex/local/cstug/thanh/pdftex/ where you will see version 14f. You can update just the pdftex and pdfetex binaries using the sources from this site without building the entire distribution. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: previewer like DVISCR (emTeX) for Linux available?
On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Thomas Martin wrote: > Hello, > until now I have been working under DOS using the emTeX distribution which > includes a comfortable previewer (DVISCR). > Now I started using Linux and XDVI but I am wondering if there > is a previewer having a ruler, text search and zoom capabilities, colour > options etc. like DVISCR. > Any recommendations? > > Thanks! > Thomas Martin EmTeX's dviscr did offer a number of useful features not found in xdvi, but (when I still had access to OS/2) I found I was using it less and less over time in favor of Acrobat Reader or GhostScript so I could use EPS (or PDF) figures. Xdvi _does_ support EPS by rasterizing the figures with GhostScript automatically, where with dviscr I generally made images for each EPS file and used a flag in the document to select between screen and printer versions. With teTeX, I use xdvi only rarely, preferring to generate PS or PDF output and use xpdf, GhostScript (with the xv frontend), or Adobe's Acrobat Reader for preview. Acrobat Reader has text search and also a useful listing of the fonts in a document (I think a fontinfo device is on the 'todo' list for GhostScript). I have not used IBM's Techexplorer under Linux, but it is certainly handy to have as well if your documents are supported. My personal preference for most work is pdftex with Adobe Acrobat Reader. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Error w/ dvips and mktexpk
On Fri, 23 Jun 2000, Ryan Scott wrote: > > Hi all, > > I am having a problem with some pk fonts at some resolutions. In > general, everything seems to run fine (with both pk fonts and > postscript type 1 fonts). However, some fonts at a particular > resolution will generate an error and will show a black box - see > details below. Two of those are the cmr5 and cmtt8 fonts. At low > resolutions, ie 83 and 91 dpi it will generate the error. However, at > higher resolutions (120 or 400 dpi) it works fine and doesn't > generate any errors. What the heck is going on? Any ideas? > > Thanks, > > --Ryan Scott > > Installation detail: > > NeXTstation running NS 3.3 or OS 4.2 on intel > teTeX 1.0.6 > HyperTeXview 0.32 for kpathsea 3.2 (Web2c 7.2) Few people use such small resolutions anymore, as xdvi will generate anti-aliased fonts from 300 or higher res pk fonts. There was a version of texview.app that did the same, but I found it rather slow (on a NeXT with limited memory and a slow disk). I do vaguely remember this problem, but stopped using CM pk fonts when I got Type 1 versions, so it is only an issue if you need a font that isn't available in Type 1 form. You should be able to install the Type 1 CM fonts included with teTeX in NeXTStep. Make sure you have good versions of the .afm files for the cmtex fonts (you can find them on Y&Y's web site -- at one point the versions on CTAN were corrupted). -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: (fwd) mktexlsr madness on NeXT
On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Thomas Esser wrote: > We are getting closer to the problem (look at the forwarded mail in the > end of my reply). I am sure that mktexlsr (alias texhash) was the reason > in the other two cases as well. > > The only thing that fires after "normal" completion of mktexlsr are the > commands in the trap line. Can you please try the following script > (executed by /bin/sh) on your system: > > #!/bin/sh > trap 'echo "-->$a<--"; exit 0' 0 1 2 3 7 13 15 > a=hi > > I guess that the output of this script is > --><-- > instead of > -->hi<-- On my NS (far from standard!) 3.3 system, I get: $ cat te.sh #!/bin/sh trap 'echo "-->$a<--"; exit 0' 0 1 2 3 7 13 15 a=hi $ ./te.sh -->hi<-- $ which echo /usr/gnu/bin/echo $ ls -l /bin/sh # from Apple's Y2K patch -rwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 131072 Jul 12 1999 /bin/sh I also tried this with /bin/echo: $ cat te.sh #!/bin/sh trap '/bin/echo "-->$a<--"; exit 0' 0 1 2 3 7 13 15 a=hi $ ./te.sh -->hi<-- > and that rm -rf behaves strange when called with "" as argument. > Maybe, you want to check this: > > #!/bin/sh > mkdir $HOME/rmtest > touch $HOME/rmtest/somefile > cd $HOME/rmtest > rm -rf "" > find $HOME/rmtest -print > > This should output the name of $HOME/rmtest and $HOME/rmtest/somefile. $ cat ./rmtest.sh #!/bin/sh mkdir $HOME/rmtest touch $HOME/rmtest/somefile cd $HOME/rmtest rm -rf "" find $HOME/rmtest -print $ ./rmtest.sh /Users/gwhite/rmtest /Users/gwhite/rmtest/somefile However, my rm is: $ rm --version rm (GNU fileutils) 4.0 Then I tried /bin/rm -- it clearly _is_ broken: $ rm -i "" rm: cannot remove `': No such file or directory $ /bin/rm -i "" rm: directory Using /bin/rm I get: $ cat rmtest.sh #!/bin/sh mkdir $HOME/rmtest touch $HOME/rmtest/somefile cd $HOME/rmtest /bin/rm -irf "" find $HOME/rmtest -print $ ./rmtest.sh rm: remove somefile? y rm: remove ? n /Users/gwhite/rmtest > Could you please check this? > > Not to forget: many, many thanks for your efforts in anylyzing > this problem! > > Thomas I for one am only too glad to help, since I can't get thru the day without using teTeX! -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Can texconfig wipeout a harddisk?
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Karsten Tinnefeld wrote: > In general, only three ways can really help, where at my site, version > 3 is the preferred ones to our system administrators: > > + Turn everythink into a taint checking perl script, or, even more secure, a > c program. > > + Use a setuid-manager to run under a restricted root account. > > + Make the database directories writable to some non-privileged user who > texhashes regularly. Maybe create a pseudo account for this. This third option really makes the most sense. The first two require considerable effort, which defeats the purpose packages like teTeX that are intended to do some useful work but clearly do not get the level of development effort needed to implement the level of security needed on many systems. Either of the first two options makes it harder to implement changes and, in the event of a disaster, makes it harder to track down the causes. > -- > Karsten Tinnefeld [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Fachbereich Informatik, Lehrstuhl 2 T +49 231 755-4737 > Universität Dortmund, D-44221 Dortmund, Deutschland F +49 231 755-2047 -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: thumbnail problem
On Sun, 11 Jun 2000, NDQ wrote: > Hi, > Sorry for this message "non related directly to teTeX" > > I use "thumbpdf" 1.4 (come with teTeX 1.0.6 under RH6.1). > I have an article (9 pages). After running pdflatex > (3.14159-14f-released-2525) on my article.tex, I got PDF file. This > PDF can be viewed with AR4.0 without any prob. > > Now I try : > > $ thumbpdf article > > And I got error : > > [quy] ~/tex/article$ thumbpdf article > THUMBPDF 1.4, 22.04.1999 - Copyright (c) 1999 by Heiko Oberdiek. > [...] The current version is 2.4, from CTAN (tex-archive/support): $ thumbpdf sample2e THUMBPDF 2.4, 2000/04/10 - Copyright (c) 1999, 2000 by Heiko Oberdiek. *** make png files / run Ghostscript *** ... -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Problem building teTeX-beta-20000305 on SGI Irix 5.3
On Tue, 16 May 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I've tried to build teTeX-beta-2305 on SGI Irix 5.3 with gcc 2.95.2 > and get: > > ln -s ./omegaware/opl2ofm.ch opl2ofm.ch > ./tangle opl2ofm.web opl2ofm.ch > This is TANGLE, Version 4.4 (Web2C 7.3.1) > *1*5*17*30*36*50*68*82*131*149*170*252*260 > Writing the output file.500.1000.1500... > Done. > (No errors were found.) > srcdir=. /bin/sh ./web2c/convert opl2ofm > gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I./.. -O2 -c opl2ofm.c > libmld--as0: Error: opl2ofm.c, line 2:cannot write pfield Make sure you have ample free space and unused quota. This could be a problem with one of the many temporary files created by the compiler (actually, apparently by the SGI assembler in this case). I usually waste a few hours looking for problems in the code before I realize that the quota system messed up and thinks I'm over quota or some other user has filled /usr/tmp. > while Omega is being built. I don't recognise this error message; > does anyone know what it means? > > The reason I was compiling from source was in order to produce > a larger-capacity TeX; a user of 1.0.7 here has reported that > a document which latexs nicely overflows the string pool when > typeset with pdflatex. I was hoping to report evidence of and > a fix for this to this list. > > John A. Murdie > Department of Computer Science > University of York > England > -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: OT: Vector graphics in pdfTeX
On 8 Apr 2000, Sascha [ISO-8859-1] Lüdecke wrote:
>
> Hi all!
>
> I normally make my graphics with xfig since it produces nice vector
> output which can be scaled easily within latex. Now I want to switch
> to pdfTeX and recognized, that xfig always uses \special{} with
> postscript commands, which are not understood by PDF (AFAIK).
>
> Is there any conversion tool which transforms my .fig into something
> scalabe? I know I can import png and alike, but this is pixel based.
> Or did I miss anything?
>
> This may be offtopic. Anyhow, I would be glad, if you can point me to
> the right location.
>
> Sascha
I've found very few problems converting to pdftex, thanks to a
long-standing policy of putting all figures into Illustrator format with
fonts replaced by outline paths. In our work, the same basic figure is
often used for publications, slides, and overheads. It is often necessary
to change notation, etc. Using Illustrator, I can combine elements from
several figures, revise annotations, etc. Most publishers like to get .ai
format figures.
You can place metapost or pdf vector art in pdftex documents. Aladdin
Ghostscript ver 6.x with the pstoedit front-end can generate either pdf
or metapost from many PS files, but since it is easier to view pdf
I prefer that format.
You can continue to make figures exactly as you did before. Create a .tex
file with one figure on each page and no captions or page numbers. Then
create EPS files using "dvips -E" configured for Type1 fonts and a high
resolution (I find 1440 works well, but some people use higher values).
There are two resolution-dependent problems with dvips using outline
fonts: a) spacing in text, and b) rules may be rendered as images. If
your figures are missing rules, you can edit the dvips file to ensure that
rules are drawn using vector operators.
I find a multi-step conversion works best:
1. pstoedit -psarg -dNOCACHE -f gs:epswrite figNN.eps tmp.eps
You should get a font-free file that looks identical to the
input file (on a high-res device).
2. pstoedit -f pstoai tmp.eps figNN.ai && rm tmp.eps
Again, the .ai file should look identical to the input.
3. tweak figNN.ai using Illustrator, adjust origin to the lower-left
corner (is this still required??). If you don't have a drawing
program, you can edit the PS file to translate the figure so the
bounding box origin is (0,0).
4. pstopdf fiNN.ai figNN.pdf
Again, the .pdf file should look identical to the input.
The .ai file is actually PostScript, but some PS interpreters will give
an "invalidrestore" error (I can provide a patch if anyone else encounters
this one).
When fonts are converted to outline paths, text won't look a nice on the
screen, but will be fine on a high-resolution device. For color (or
greyscale) devices, a good anti-aliased render is crucial. Until
recently, I used a Photoshop plug-in called Epilogue that contained a full
level2 PS interpreter with excellent anti-aliasing, but this product is no
longer available. To get comparable quality with ghostscript I render a
4x oversampling and downsize in Photoshop. Maybe someday font technology
will make it possible to keep fonts in figures, but at present there are
still too many problems getting fonts work properly in multiple platforms
and applications.
--
George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: [BUG?] dvips with -Ppdf and mf-font
On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Ken Smith wrote: > Sebastian Rahtz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote on Sun, 5 Mar 2000 14:16:29 + (GMT) > > [...] > > the config.pdf needs a M line specifying a Metafont mode for an 8000 > > dpi device. hmm. > > Has anyone, anywhere, produced a document suggesting to people that > using bitmaps for printers with this sort of resolution is not really > a wise procedure? The fact that there is not a corresponding metafont mode suggests that this number (8000) was not chosen for use with pk fonts. I can think of a couple other reasons this might be useful, although 1440 usually works for me (see below). > > Sebastian > > Ken Smith > [EMAIL PROTECTED] Some people operate under the impression that PS is scalable. Even when using Type1 fonts, dvips output is device dependent. People who use Win32 can run Y&Y's dvipsone and avoid the problems with dvips, but teTeX users may not have that option. In my own experience, mostly using Type1 fonts, a problem of resolution dependence in files created by dvips arises in two ways: 1) with rules, which dvips attempts to draw using image operators if the device resolution appears "compatible" with the resolution set when the file was created, and 2) with spacing and placement in files created with a low resolution and then used at a higher resolution. (1) can be "overcome" by tweaking the PS code. I assume (2) is related to the way dvips determines the values passed to "moveto", but haven't investigated. I was forced to figure out (1) because some PS clone printers "lie" about the resolution and were failing on files created with dvips. It may be time to think about overhauling dvips, probably stealing as much as possible from pdftex's output routines. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: pdftex crashes on double boxes.
On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Krzysztof Leszczynski wrote:
> Consider a simple pdfTeX file:
>
> \setbox0=\hbox{\pdfimage {any-humble-png-image.png}}
> \copy0
> \copy0 %% <-- it crashes here
> \bye
>
> When there's only one \copy0 pdfTeX produces correct pdf file.
> When I type \copy0 twice pdftex crashes with a message:
>
> libpng error: Not enough image data
>
> Would you help me please? I need to copy a box several times.
> In the real (and long) example \copy \boxno is a part of my
> \output routine, and I can not regenerate it easily.
>
> The example was run on Mandrake, tetex-1.0.6, libpng-1.0.5
> but it seems to be crashing on other pdftexes too.
>
> Thanx in advance
>
> --chris
\pdfimage is from an old version of pdftex. Using:
\setbox0=\hbox{\pdfximage width 10cm
{tiger.png}\pdfrefximage\pdflastximage}
I get:
$ pdftex pngimg.tex
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-14d (Web2C 7.3.1)
(pngimg.tex{/Data/local/teTeX-1.0/share/texmf/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg}
Babel and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german,
ngerman, nohyphenation, loaded.
[1{/Data/local/teTeX-1.0/share/texmf/dvips/config/pdftex.map}
<./tiger.png>]
[2] )
Output written on pngimg.pdf (2 pages, 88658 bytes).
Transcript written on pngimg.log.
To get current information, follow the links in the teTeX documentation
to http://www.tug.org/applications/pdftex.
--
George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
