[luatex] lua scripts

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Sat Apr 23 01:52:33 CEST 2011


On 2011-04-22 at 08:36:08 -0400, Bob Tennent wrote:

 > >|I just see that in your CTAN package there is a file
 > >|
 > >|   fonts/map/dvipdfm/musixtex/musix.map
 > >|
 > >|which is waste.  map files for dvipdfm have never been used.
 > >|Instead, updmap creates dvipdfm.map automatically from the files
 > >|in fonts/map/dvips and fonts/map/pdftex.  The TeX Live 2011
 > >|version of updmap will not create a dvipdfm.map file because
 > >|there is no program anymore which uses it.  dvipdfm is a symlink
 > >|to dvipdfmx, and the latter understands pdftex.map.
 
Hi Bob,

 > TeXLive isn't the *only* consumer of CTAN files. 

whenever I talk about CTAN packages, I'm aware that there are other
distributions than TeX Live and I have them in mind.

 > The dvipdfm map was in the upstream bundle and presumably dvipdfm
 > is used by some musixtex-ers.

dvipdfm never used these files and dvipdfm.map was always created
automatically from the same sources as psfonts.map and pdftex.map.

If there would be any TeX distribution which needs these files, then
dvipdfm won't work anyway because there are only very few of these map
files on CTAN.  There had been zillions of fonts on CTAN already when
the author of dvipdfm decided to invent his own, deliberately
incompatible, map-file format.

 > The map file could be omitted from TeXLive if it's useless there.

In principle, yes.  But it can be done only semi-automatically.  It's
necessary to add some code to the scripts in order to process your
package properly.  And whenever your package is updated, the scripts
say that files have been rejected and it's necessary to check whether
this is ok or whether you moved files around and the scripts must be
adapted.

It would be better not to upload superfluous files to CTAN.  I just
ran

  find tex-archive -type d -name dvipdfm 

on my CTAN mirror.  It didn't find much, most of the font related
things are only in .zip files.  But the first thing that was found is:

  tex-archive/language/georgian/texmf-local/fonts/map/dvipdfm/djg.map 

I loaded this file into a text editor, and, SIGH, this file is only
understood by dvips and pdftex, but definiteley not by dvipdfm, as the
directory name implies.  

Please note that this was only the first file in a dvipdfm directory I
found on CTAN!  I didn't look into the others and I didn't look into
all the .zip files.

This means that one cannot rely on file/directory names at all, one
has to look into each file in order to be absolutely sure.  But this
is impossible:

$ find /usr/local/texlive/2010 -type f | wc -l
96781

It's obvious now that any superfluous file on CTAN causes a lot of
avoidable trouble, isn't it?

Your package contains two different map files with the same name in
different directories.  This is always problematic.  It's even more
problematic because names of map files are always supposed to be
unique.  A file foo.map is either in fonts/map/dvips *or* in
fonts/map/pdftex, but never in both.  Thus, if someone writes a
consistency checker, it will always stumble over your package.

Certainly, the easiest way to put something on CTAN is to include
everything you don't know what it's good for and let things be sorted
out by others.  But according to the TeX Catalogue, abt. 1800 people
uploaded stuff to CTAN, and there is only one who sorts things out in
order to get the stuff into TeX distributions.  

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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