MacOSX-TeX Digest #280 - 03/31/02

TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu
Mon Apr 1 03:00:01 CEST 2002


MacOSX-TeX Digest #280 - Sunday, March 31, 2002

  The measure of progress
          by "Adrian Heathcote" <adrian.heathcote at philosophy.usyd.edu.au>
  More on Illustrator 10 Font Problems with TeXShop / TeTex
          by "Gordon Sick" <gordonsick at mac.com>
  OT: [OS X TeX] The measure of progress
          by "Gerben Wierda" <sherlock at rna.nl>
  locate (was: Re: [OS X TeX] Two questions (documentation-related))
          by "Martin Stokhof" <stokhof at hum.uva.nl>
  Re: locate (was: Re: [OS X TeX] Two questions (documentation-related))
          by "Enrico Franconi" <franconi at cs.man.ac.uk>
  Re: [OS X TeX] ANNOUNCE: New TeX/gs releases for Mac OS X
          by "M. Tamer Özsu" <tozsu at sympatico.ca>
  Re: problem setting paper size
          by "Andrew Trevorrow" <andrew at trevorrow.com>
  Re: The OzTeX CD
          by "Andrew Trevorrow" <andrew at trevorrow.com>
  Re: [OS X TeX] ANNOUNCE: New TeX/gs releases for Mac OS X
          by "Gerben Wierda" <sherlock at rna.nl>
  Re: [OS X TeX] Re: problem setting paper size
          by "Gerben Wierda" <sherlock at rna.nl>
  Re: OT: [OS X TeX] The measure of progress
          by "Oscar Chávez" <oc918 at mizzou.edu>
  Re: locate (was: Re: [OS X TeX] Two questions  (documentation-related))
          by "Martin Stokhof" <stokhof at hum.uva.nl>
  Re: [OS X TeX] The measure of progress
          by "Piet van Oostrum" <piet at cs.uu.nl>
  MacDviX and MacGhostViewX
          by "Tom Kiffe" <tom at kiffe.com>
  ANNOUNCE mbtimes font package
          by "Michel Bovani" <michel.bovani at wanadoo.fr>
  searching mailing list archives
          by <hills_tex at tina.stanford.edu>
  a LaTeX type 1 grouped font?
          by <hills_tex at tina.stanford.edu>
  Re: [OS X TeX] searching mailing list archives
          by "Gary L. Gray" <gray at engr.psu.edu>


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: The measure of progress
From: "Adrian Heathcote" <adrian.heathcote at philosophy.usyd.edu.au>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 13:57:57 +1000

All

I'm concerned about the rate of change for TeXShop. Incremental changes 
in the decimal column mean that it will take 81 changes for us to ever 
get to TeXShop 2.00. Assuming, for the moment, a constant rate of 
revision of one change every month, that means that we will not get to 
2.00 for almost seven years!

But the reality is likely to be far worse. If we assume that Dick Koch 
improves TeXShop with every revision, so as to make future revisions 
less needed and therefore less frequent, I think we can easily envision 
a scenario whereby none of us ever lives to see TeXShop 2.00!

Easter can easily bring on morbid reflections on death and change. Is 
the solution here simply more prayer and fasting?


In concern

A.H.


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: More on Illustrator 10 Font Problems with TeXShop / TeTex
From: "Gordon Sick" <gordonsick at mac.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 21:11:27 -0700

Hi,
	My son and I are having a variety of problems with Illustrator 10 
and fonts with TeXShop, on 4 different machines. In our most reliable 
configuration, I can run TeXShop on the following LaTex code:
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\begin{document}
$A\cdot A-B$
  \end{document}

If I  run TeXShop with the PdfTex option on, I get a PDF file , which 
doesn't render the dot or the minus sign in Illustrator 10, but which 
renders it in Acrobat 5 (the full Acrobat, not the Reader).
	If I run TeXShop with the Tex and GhostScript Option, I get a PDF 
file, which does render the dot and the minus sign in Illustrator 10.
	I've installed the Tex-Illustrator fonts in 
/Library/Fonts/ComputerModern I've also installed them in 
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts/TeX-Illustrator.

	There is great support here for TeXShop and teTex on the Mac, so I 
thank you in advance for your help.
--gordon Sick


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: OT: [OS X TeX] The measure of progress
From: "Gerben Wierda" <sherlock at rna.nl>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 11:11:29 +0200

On Sunday, March 31, 2002, at 05:57 , Adrian Heathcote wrote:

> All
>
> I'm concerned about the rate of change for TeXShop. Incremental changes 
> in the decimal column mean that it will take 81 changes for us to ever 
> get to TeXShop 2.00. Assuming, for the moment, a constant rate of 
> revision of one change every month, that means that we will not get to 
> 2.00 for almost seven years!

Why seven year.s? I envisage a TeXShop.app version 1.136...

>
> But the reality is likely to be far worse. If we assume that Dick Koch 
> improves TeXShop with every revision, so as to make future revisions 
> less needed and therefore less frequent, I think we can easily envision 
> a scenario whereby none of us ever lives to see TeXShop 2.00!

Hah, the lure of beautiful round numbers. Raed "The Number Sense" by 
Stanislas Dehaene (Penguin).

Seriously, I think a major revision is something you do when you lose 
upward compatibility of the old version with the new version. That could 
come for instannce when Dick stops using that *.texshop method for 
keeping track of the root of the project. Or something else.

G


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: locate (was: Re: [OS X TeX] Two questions (documentation-related))
From: "Martin Stokhof" <stokhof at hum.uva.nl>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 12:12:26 +0200

A follow-up to my question regarding MacJanitor and Locate. First of 
all, thanks to Enrico and Claus for their suggestions.
Enrico suggested that the problem might be  fink's new version of 
locate. I checked and what I found was the following:
- one version of locate, in /usr/bin
- one locate.database, in /private/var/db/locate.database
- one script, called locate.updatedb, in /usr/libexec
- a file called locate.updatedb.8, in /usr/share/man/man8
So it doesn't seem to be that.
As for Claus' suggestion that the preview option of Locate might be 
the culprit: I've never had that one switched on.
The phenomenon (Locate not being able to find files after MacJanitor 
having updated the database) persists, but by checking various kinds 
of files (I know, I should have done that before ;-) I've found that 
it holds only for files in my home directory, everything else can be 
found by Locate after MacJanitor is run. This suggests that the 
update MacJanitor invokes ignores files in the home directory.
I had a look at /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb, and it has: set 
SRCHPATHS = "/" , which I guess means that all directories are 
searched. (I have no expereince with shell scripts.)
I'm not quite sure what  locate.updatedb.8 is all about, but it does 
seems to refer to the /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb script.

Martin

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: locate (was: Re: [OS X TeX] Two questions (documentation-related))
From: "Enrico Franconi" <franconi at cs.man.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 11:57:23 +0100

On March 31, Martin Stokhof writes:
> The phenomenon (Locate not being able to find files after MacJanitor
> having updated the database) persists, but by checking various kinds
> of files (I know, I should have done that before ;-) I've found that
> it holds only for files in my home directory, everything else can be
> found by Locate after MacJanitor is run. 

Is your home in a different volume/partition? If this is the case, you
have to specify explicitly more than one root to search from. See
man locate.updatedb

> This suggests that the update MacJanitor invokes ignores files in
> the home directory.  I had a look at /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb,
> and it has: set SRCHPATHS = "/" , which I guess means that all
> directories are searched. (I have no expereince with shell scripts.)

Only if in the same volume, usually.

> I'm not quite sure what locate.updatedb.8 is all about, but it does
> seems to refer to the /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb script.

It is the manual.

cheers
-- e.

Enrico Franconi                     - franconi at cs.man.ac.uk
University of Manchester            - http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~franconi/
Department of Computer Science      - Phone: +44 (161) 275 6170
Manchester M13 9PL, UK              - Fax:   +44 (161) 275 6204

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] ANNOUNCE: New TeX/gs releases for Mac OS X
From: "M. Tamer Özsu" <tozsu at sympatico.ca>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 06:43:03 -0500

On 3/28/02 8:00 AM, "Gerben Wierda" <sherlock at rna.nl> wrote:

> Dear everybody,
> 
> I am happy to announce the release of a new TeX/gs release and a new
> generic installer-mechanism. I have also released an update of the old
> installer.
...

I am trying to use the installer and attempted to change the ghostscript URL
to 7 as indicated in the readme file. However, I am getting the error
message 

"i-Package name should stay the same."

when I try to change the URL. What am I doing wrong?
--
M. Tamer Ozsu
University of Waterloo


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: problem setting paper size
From: "Andrew Trevorrow" <andrew at trevorrow.com>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 22:49:57 +1100

Gerben Wierda wrote:

>>   % sudo texconfig dvips paper letter
>>   Password:
>>   Error: value 'letter' not in list 'See'.
>>   % sudo texconfig pdftex paper letter
>>   Error: value 'letter' not in list 'See'.
> 
> This has come up once before, and thanks to Karl, it is now clear what
> is going on, so I'll inform all of you (and have adapted my web site
> 'tex know how' info). It turns out that the personal texmf tree he used
> was also used with OzTeX at some point, and OzTeX has written a
> config.ps there that is incompatible with texconfig.

I just want to make it clear that OzTeX is not the culprit.
It cannot write a config.ps file into someone's texmf tree.
What actually happened was that Karl put a copy of OzTeX's config.ps
into ~/Library/texmf/dvips/config/.

The real problem is that texconfig seems to assume % is the only valid
comment character in config.ps, but dvips can recognize any of these:

% space * # ;

OzTeX's config.ps starts with the line "* See ..." which explains
the above error message.  (This is not an OzTeX peculiarity -- the
config.ps file in Tom Rokicki's vanilla dvips distribution and in
the dvipsk distribution both use * to start comments.)

I think texconfig needs to be modified to handle all cases if it's
going to read user-supplied config.ps files.  I will modify all my
dvips config files to use % to help avoid the problem (it's a more
familiar comment character anyway) but there are likely to be
people out there with their own config.ps files that use *.

Andrew

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: The OzTeX CD
From: "Andrew Trevorrow" <andrew at trevorrow.com>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 22:49:57 +1100

> Are you going to include enabled sets of fonts on the CD?

Yes, as many as I can legally include.

> Also , there was some discussion on the list some time ago about how,
> under OS X, files needed to be viewed at greater than 100% to look as
> smooth as they did under classic.  As I recall you made some comment
> about a difference between how ATM works and the corresponding part
> of OS X as being the cause of the problem.  In any event, this is
> certainly my experience.  Assuming I haven't missed something on the
> list, is there any resolution to this problem likely in the near
> future?

Not that I'm aware of. I think the problem -- for the CM/PS fonts
at least -- is that the bitmap info is being used by the OS X font
renderer at actual size and smaller.  Maybe the problem could be solved
by removing the bitmap info from the fonts (so only the outline info
is available), but I don't know how to do that (is Tom Kacvinsky on
this list?).

But I'm no expert on Mac fonts so take the above with a grain of salt.
Maybe some of the font gurus on this list would know more.

Andrew

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] ANNOUNCE: New TeX/gs releases for Mac OS X
From: "Gerben Wierda" <sherlock at rna.nl>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 14:21:27 +0200

On Sunday, March 31, 2002, at 01:43 , M. Tamer Özsu wrote:

> I am trying to use the installer and attempted to change the 
> ghostscript URL
> to 7 as indicated in the readme file. However, I am getting the error
> message
>
> "i-Package name should stay the same."
>
> when I try to change the URL. What am I doing wrong?

You should not change the name of the package, because just changing the 
name does not change the contents. You need to use the "Open URL" from 
the File Menu. This will open a *separate* gs7 package if you enter the 
correct URL there.

G


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] Re: problem setting paper size
From: "Gerben Wierda" <sherlock at rna.nl>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 15:23:46 +0200

It turns out that the problem lies elsewhere. texconfig understands 
other comment styles fine. It is just that the file is classic mac os 
style in that it has classic line endings. texconfig, being a unix 
script, does not understand that. And it is rather difficult to change 
that, since it is a shell script using standard unix commands.

I'll add a protection statetment to the installer, before texconfig is 
being run. It does not protect you for 100% as it does not protect 
against addition of trees later on, but maybe Andrew (and others) can 
add a comment to his distribution about importing user trees.

Changing line endings to Mac OS X/unix style in a Terminal window.

	perl -pi -e "s/\r/\n/g;" ~/Library/texmf/dvips/config/config.ps
	sudo perl -pi -e "s/\r/\n/g;" 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/dvips/config/config.ps
	sudo texhash /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local

G

On Sunday, March 31, 2002, at 01:49 , Andrew Trevorrow wrote:

> Gerben Wierda wrote:
>
>>>   % sudo texconfig dvips paper letter
>>>   Password:
>>>   Error: value 'letter' not in list 'See'.
>>>   % sudo texconfig pdftex paper letter
>>>   Error: value 'letter' not in list 'See'.
>>
>> This has come up once before, and thanks to Karl, it is now clear what
>> is going on, so I'll inform all of you (and have adapted my web site
>> 'tex know how' info). It turns out that the personal texmf tree he used
>> was also used with OzTeX at some point, and OzTeX has written a
>> config.ps there that is incompatible with texconfig.
>
> I just want to make it clear that OzTeX is not the culprit.
> It cannot write a config.ps file into someone's texmf tree.
> What actually happened was that Karl put a copy of OzTeX's config.ps
> into ~/Library/texmf/dvips/config/.
>
> The real problem is that texconfig seems to assume % is the only valid
> comment character in config.ps, but dvips can recognize any of these:
>
> % space * # ;
>
> OzTeX's config.ps starts with the line "* See ..." which explains
> the above error message.  (This is not an OzTeX peculiarity -- the
> config.ps file in Tom Rokicki's vanilla dvips distribution and in
> the dvipsk distribution both use * to start comments.)
>
> I think texconfig needs to be modified to handle all cases if it's
> going to read user-supplied config.ps files.  I will modify all my
> dvips config files to use % to help avoid the problem (it's a more
> familiar comment character anyway) but there are likely to be
> people out there with their own config.ps files that use *.
>
> Andrew
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> To UNSUBSCRIBE, send email to <info at email.esm.psu.edu> with
> "unsubscribe macosx-tex" (no quotes) in the body.
> For additional HELP, send email to <info at email.esm.psu.edu> with
> "help" (no quotes) in the body.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: OT: [OS X TeX] The measure of progress
From: "Oscar Chávez" <oc918 at mizzou.edu>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 09:01:12 -0600

On Sunday, March 31, 2002, at 03:11 AM, Gerben Wierda wrote:

> Why seven year.s? I envisage a TeXShop.app version 1.136...
>
> [..]
> Hah, the lure of beautiful round numbers. Raed "The Number Sense" by
> Stanislas Dehaene (Penguin).

Being now at 1.19, 1.136... seems an unlikely goal. However, what about 1.
4142... to please the taste for irrationality among TeX developers?

And just take a look at how long it took for pdfTeX to reach version 1.00 
(some people still use 0.14).

Oscar Chávez


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: locate (was: Re: [OS X TeX] Two questions  (documentation-related))
From: "Martin Stokhof" <stokhof at hum.uva.nl>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 17:29:33 +0200

At 11:57 +0100 on 31/03/02, Enrico Franconi wrote:

>On March 31, Martin Stokhof writes:
>>  The phenomenon (Locate not being able to find files after MacJanitor
>>  having updated the database) persists, but by checking various kinds
>>  of files (I know, I should have done that before ;-) I've found that
>>  it holds only for files in my home directory, everything else can be
>>  found by Locate after MacJanitor is run.
>
>Is your home in a different volume/partition? If this is the case, you
>have to specify explicitly more than one root to search from. See
>man locate.updatedb

No, same volume, same partition. Btw, locate in the command line 
behaves exactly as Locator (which isn't surprising). But then one 
wonders what the "rebuild locate database" command in Locator does 
that the weekly script as run by MacJanitor does not. I've contacted 
the authors of Locator & MacJanitor about this and will report if I 
hear from them. Thanks once more for the suggestions.

Martin


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] The measure of progress
From: "Piet van Oostrum" <piet at cs.uu.nl>
Date: 31 Mar 2002 18:04:04 +0200

>>>>> Adrian Heathcote <adrian.heathcote at philosophy.usyd.edu.au> (AH) writes:

AH> All
AH> I'm concerned about the rate of change for TeXShop. Incremental changes in
AH> the decimal column mean that it will take 81 changes for us to ever get to
AH> TeXShop 2.00. Assuming, for the moment, a constant rate of revision of one
AH> change every month, that means that we will not get to 2.00 for almost
AH> seven years!

And the seventh year being a sabbath year it will become almost eight!
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP]
Private email: P.van.Oostrum at hccnet.nl


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: MacDviX and MacGhostViewX
From: "Tom Kiffe" <tom at kiffe.com>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 11:26:30 -0600

Greetings,

Updated programs are available from http://www.kiffe.com/textools.html.

Both MacDviX and MacGhostViewX now support "live" scrolling in their display
windows and their "Recent Items" menu has changed slightly.

Enrico Franconi has contributed some scripts to MacDviX which allow it to open
a tex source file in mac-emacs and select the line in the source file
corresponding to an option-click in MacDviX's display window. Instructions for
configuring mac-emacs are included. The list of editors which support 
MacDviX now includes Alpha, BBEdit, BBEdit Lite, and mac-emacs.

The srcltx package has been removed from the MacDviX distribution since it is
obsolete. Recent versions of tex and latex can add \src specials to dvi files
with the option -src-specials. There is no need to include a package in the
tex sources. Just run
	(la)tex -src-specials foo.tex
and foo.dvi will include \src specials. To check if your copy of tex supports
src specials type 
	tex -help
in a Terminal window.

Tom

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: ANNOUNCE mbtimes font package
From: "Michel Bovani" <michel.bovani at wanadoo.fr>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 22:35:26 +0200

Its a font package with more possibilities than mathptmx and (probably) less
quality than mathtimes (but it is free).

NOTE: mbtimes is still beta-version: please don't redistribute it...

You can download it at

ftp://ftp.gutenberg.eu.org/pub/gut/distribs/mbtimes/mbt-texmf-020331.sit.bin

All suggestion are welcome. Type1 fonts in mac format (for macdvi, oztex,
textures) are not still avaible, but they will come...


***** Description *****
mbtimes is a font package wich allows usage of times for text and maths.

1 - uses virtual fonts partially based on omega greek and latin families.

2 - have ff ffi ffl ligatures.

3 - have (optionnaly) ct, st, fj ligatures.

4 - support the \boldmath command.

5 - support the \jmath command.

6 - comes with spécific PostScript Type1 math fonts (wich suit times in
terms of weight, contrast and style).

7 - uses for blackboard bold the esstix14 font from elsevier free esstix
distribution. Note that you are *not* allowed to

  * distribute this font alone
  * modify this font

8 - perhaps have bugs... Please tell me.

-- 
Michel Bovani



----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: searching mailing list archives
From: <hills_tex at tina.stanford.edu>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 14:52:07 -0800

As a new subscriber, I'd welcome any suggestions for searching the archives.

the google search on the archives page seems to have problems--it isn't
finding much in the 2002 digests, and I'm getting warning messages:
  e.g., on a search for "fonts illustrator" I get:

  "fonts" (and any subsequent words) was ignored because we limit queries to
          10 words.
  "www" is a very common word and was not included in your search.


Thanks,
Matt
(trying to avoid asking questions that must surely have cropped up a few
 times)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: a LaTeX type 1 grouped font?
From: <hills_tex at tina.stanford.edu>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 15:11:19 -0800

I'm pretty happy being able to install the Y&Y/Bluesky type-1 CM fonts in
Adobe's application support folder and then have them available in
Illustrator.  I'm wondering if there is a way to trim down the # of menu
spaces the font takes?

(ie, instead of seeing cmr10 and cmr12 listed separately, I just see "cmr".)

How does Y&Y's Lucida Bright series show up?

thanks,
Matt

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] searching mailing list archives
From: "Gary L. Gray" <gray at engr.psu.edu>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 19:13:47 -0500

On 3/31/02 5:52 PM, "hills_tex at tina.stanford.edu"
<hills_tex at tina.stanford.edu> wrote:

> As a new subscriber, I'd welcome any suggestions for searching the archives.
> 
> the google search on the archives page seems to have problems--it isn't
> finding much in the 2002 digests, and I'm getting warning messages:
> e.g., on a search for "fonts illustrator" I get:
> 
> "fonts" (and any subsequent words) was ignored because we limit queries to
>         10 words.
> "www" is a very common word and was not included in your search.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Matt
> (trying to avoid asking questions that must surely have cropped up a few
> times)

I am afraid that for now, we are at the mercy of how often the Google-bots
look for new stuff. I would think that some 2002 stuff should be showing up.

I am hoping to have all the archives at a more searchable location some time
in the future. In fact, I hope to have it available on the tug.org Mailing
Lists.

-- Gary 


----------------------------------------------------------------------
End of MacOSX-TeX Digest

-----------------------------------------------------------------
To UNSUBSCRIBE, send email to <info at email.esm.psu.edu> with
"unsubscribe macosx-tex" (no quotes) in the body.
For additional HELP, send email to <info at email.esm.psu.edu> with
"help" (no quotes) in the body.
-----------------------------------------------------------------


More information about the macostex-archives mailing list