[tex-live] updmap and TEXMFHOME

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 3 December 2010 Bob Tennent wrote:

 > TEXMFHOME is the only reasonable place to put licensed proprietary
 > fonts.

Sure.  But which TeX engines are you using?  If you need pdftex and
luatex only, I recommend to add \pdfmapline to the macro package which
is loading the font(s).  But it doesn't work with dvips or xetex.

\pdfmapline is a pdftex primitive and described in the pdftex manual.


On 3 December 2010 Norbert Preining wrote:

 >> Lots of applications allow for system/local/user configuration
 >> files, and allow call-time options as well.
 > 
 > If someone steps forward and does that for tex, pdftex, xetex,
 > dvips, luatex, etc etc that would be great ... but nobody did.

I would be very grateful if someone finds the time to implement
\pdfmapline in dvips.  We already can pass the information on the
command line, what's missing is the ability to pass it via \special.
As far as xetex is concerned, maybe Jonathan can steal code from
pdftex.

IMO \pdfmapline is by far the better concept.  I'm absolutely
convinced that it's more valuable to invest the time in order to get
rid of updmap instead of improving it.

I recently used \pdfmapline for a modified version of a font.  It's
amazing how easy things can be.  AFAIK, ConTeXt uses \pdfmapline for
ages and doesn't use updmap at all.

Bob mentioned call-time options.  I don't have the slightest idea how
to implement them with the existing model.  With \pdfmapline it's
extremely easy.  Everything can be done at macro level.  Instead of
running 

  updmap --setoption pdftexDownloadBase14=false

and creating all the map files again, one could simply write:

  \usepackage[download=false]{helvetica}

This would be a significant improvement, IMO.


Another thing comes to my mind: Since dvipdfm is a symlink to dvipdfmx
now, is there any program that needs dvipdfm.map anymore?  According
to strace, dvipdfmx uses pdftex.map.  Can we comment out the piece of
code in updmap which creates this file?  It slows down updmap so much.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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