At 07:24 PM 9/20/00 -0300, George White wrote:
>>On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, Hans Hagen wrote:
>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.
This is a difficult problem. On todays systems messages are shown so fast
that no one sees them.
The main problem in logging fonts is that there is no quick way to
determine if a font is available. I looked into this some time ago, but
file searching sort of interferes here.
>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).
I recently found out that there have been changes in low level tex code
with regards to reporting font names in overfull boxes. quite annoying btw
such a change, since i used to catch it and assumed that it was frozen tex
code -)
>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.
There was posting on the context list on free lucida's which i have to look
into.
I can think of a method where users have to enable specific font support,
but that would mean that context will not be upward compatible which is bad.
We may consider the following: patch web2c so that \font\somefont=somename
does not report an error, but sets the font to nullfont so that we can
check on it. An alternative is: \openin18=filename to open any file known
to kpse and let \ifeof be used to determine its existence. But, it's more
complicated, since many tex's have lbr.tfm but lack lbr.pfb or used a
mapped version. So, another approach would be:
\immediate\write18{locatefont: filename logfile}
and report back info about available pfb/pk's to tfm files. This is not so
much different from pdftex calling mf to generate fonts but not portable
among tex's. I'll give it a thought.
Maybe I should provide a utility that auto maps fonts. Not that complicated
i think. I'll give it a thought too, since it seems a clean solution.
Hans
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