[tex-live] TexLive 2007 & russian language support (on Win32 platform)

[Staszek Wawrykiewicz]

>From kakuto at fsci.fuk.kindai.ac.jp Tue Sep 11 23:26:43 2007
Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:21:04 +0900
From: Akira Kakuto <kakuto at fsci.fuk.kindai.ac.jp>
To: tex-live at tug.org
Subject: [tex-live] TexLive 2007 & russian language support (on Win32
    platform)

Akira Kakuto wrote on 05 Sep 2007:
> On Die, 04 Sep 2007, Mikhail Filimonov wrote:
>> I have a document which uses a lot of different russian fonts.
>> If  TexLive does not found metric file it calls MF to create it (and it
>> is desired behavour).
>> BUT: after creating metic file, compliling of TEX file fails with
>> diffents errors.
> [...]
> On W32TeX, TeX compilation does not stop and
> all are the same as Norbert, so I cannot understand
> the situation Mikhail encountered.
> However, some of "mktex*" programs are different between
> W32TeX and TeXLive2007 for Windows.
> I'm not actually running TeXLive2007, therefore
> I want to pass the problem to the other suitable
> person (Staszek ?).

Sorry for a late response. I can confirm that this problem occurs only
when .mf file is missing, that is TeX compilation stops after generating
e.g. larm1000.mf, etc. (such files are generated on-the-fly). larm1000.tfm
is also generated, but for some unknown reason cannot be found by (la)tex.
Any subsequent tex compilation is then successfull.
Well, please note, that while preparing TL2007 distribution, we didn't have 
mktex* programs from W32TeX, so we borrowed them from earlier TL.

I tried to use mktexmf, mktextfm and mktexpk from the current W32TeX 
(mftools.tar.gz as on 26 Jul 2007) in TL2007 and they worked somehow. 
The generated .mf and .tfm files are stored in texmf-dist/fonts/ 
(instead of texmf-var/fonts/ ) but ls-R databases aren't updated. 
Any subsequent tex run tries to regenerate it, but as .tfm
files have been found anyway, we can only see some warning messages:

Running mktextfm larm1000
kpathsea: Running mktexmf larm1000.mf
name = larm1000, rootname = larm, pointsize = 1000
mktexmf: c:/TeXLive2007/texmf-dist/fonts/source/lh/lh-t2a/larm1000.mf 
already exists.
c:/TeXLive2007/texmf-dist/fonts/tfm/lh/lh-t2a/larm1000.tfm exists
...

I can only hope that the next release of TL will contain complete and
consistent set of win32 binaries. Akira, what do you think?

Thanks and all the best,

-- 
Staszek Wawrykiewicz
StaW at gust.org.pl