[tex-k] basic kpse_find_{format} question

[Stefan Ulrich]

Daniel Wyckoff <dwyckoff76 at hotmail.com> writes:

> Dear Tex-K Mailing List:

> I'm currently writing an open-source DVI previewer that will suit my
> own eccentric needs.  It's going really well.

Yeah, that can be fun ...

> How does one find the format of a given fontname that one reads from
> a DVI file?

Well, if you look at xdvik, it does it in a rather pedestrian way:
it checks all possibilities in sequence for a fontname that it has
read from the DVI file (see font_open() in
http://xdvi.cvs.sourceforge.net/xdvi/xdvik/texk/xdvik/font-open.c?view=markup)
and returns for the first one that succeeds:

   kpse_find_ovf(fontname) --> virtual fonts are tried first
   kpse_find_vf(fontname)
   find_T1_font(fontname) (if t1lib is enabled)
   kpse_find_glyph(fontname, ...)

   -- if still not found, try fallbacks:
   find_T1_font(resource.alt_font) (if t1lib is enabled)
   kpse_find_glyph(resource.alt_font, ...)
 

Cheers,
Stefan