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Would like MakeTeXPK to write into texmf/fonts/public/cm/pk/..




Dear Karl Berry and U-W maintainers of TeX,

I recently installed a brand-new LaTeX2e setup with the kpathsearch
extensions.  Everything was new, there was no existing TeX
installation.  I also wanted postscript fonts.  I just would like to
give you some feedback.  

1.  The notes on setup of postscript fonts (packages/psnfss/psnfss2e.tex)
is somewhat out of date.  You don't need to do everything mentioned
there.  The notes about map files for dvips are especially confusing
because my copy of dvips came standard with a file psfonts.map that
had everything necessary.

2. Fontname seems to be essentially undocumented.  I found that pk
fonts were being created under texmf/fonts/tmp/ instead of in the
proper directories because I was missing fontname. But there was
essentially no mention of the "fontname" stuff; I only figured it out
by reading the comment/def in MakeTeXPK and ftp-ing around on CTAN.
It sure would have been helpful if that had been mentioned more
clearly somewhere, such as in the kpathsea.texi file.

3. Finally, a possible bug.  I had (I don't know why) a directory
texmf/tex/latex209/dvips with some config files for using ps fonts.
Kpathsea calmly ignored that directory when using latex2e.  But, after
I created a ls-R database, kpathsea insisted on using file
"psfonts.sty" in that directory even when using latex2e, which of 
course was deadly.  Remove the database, the problem goes away again.
I finally nuked that directory (it was never used) and recreated the
database, all was then well.  But it still seems to me that this
should not have happened.

4.  I've really been struggling with gsftopk.  This seems to suffer
from a lack of consistent documentation as well.  I think that the
mods by Yves Arrouye for kpathsea might need some additional
attention.  I finally gave up on this one.

In general, setting TeX up for using additional fonts has been pretty
hairy.  Is it possible that I missed a very important piece of the
documentation somewhere and just made my life unnecessarily difficult?
Any and all hints gratefully appreciated.  Thanks for listening.

chris...
--
Christopher Lott    lott@informatik.uni-kl.de    +49 (631) 205-3342, Fax -3331
Address: FB Informatik-Bau 57, Universitaet KL, 67653 Kaiserslautern, Germany
World-wide web: http://uomo.informatik.uni-kl.de:2080/Personalia/cml/