[texhax] TexLive, gutsy and garamond

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Wed Dec 12 02:52:25 CET 2007


    the scaffolding that's used for fonts 

It's not really *that* complicated.

When you say 
\font\foo = bar
TeX looks for bar.tfm.  That's all TeX-the-typesetter cares about, the
metrics.

Now, when pdftex is used, of course it has to find the actual glyphs.
So it looks in the file pdftex.map.  If the name of the tfm file appears
in the first column of pdftex.map, then it follows the instructions on
the rest of the line (typically to download a pfb using some encoding.)

If the tfm name doesn't appear in pdftex.map, it falls back to trying to
make a bitmap font.

When dvips is used, it's the same procedure, except psfonts.map is used
for lookup instead of pdftex.map.

pdftex.map and psfonts.map (and dvipdfm's map file too) are typically
maintained via running updmap[-sys].

    \font\rm=texnansi-ugmr8a
    ...
    I found it interesting (and of course I don't understand this) that the tfm
    file is called texnansi-ugmr8a.tfm, and yet the error message refers to
    texnansi-raw-ugmr8a. Presumably that makes some sort of sense to those who
    understand this stuff :-)

Actually, this does not make sense to me.  Since TeX is not complaining
about a missing texnansi-ugmr8a.tfm, there must be one on your system,
somewhere.

My next idea is that there is also a texnansi-ugmr8a.vf, and that
"virtual font" (DEK's name, not our choice :) which refers to
texnansi-raw-ugmr8a.  I won't try to explain virtual fonts here :).

    So from what you said, this sounds like a bug in the distribution. 

Yes.

    can confirm that indeed there should be some entry for texnansi-raw-ugmr8a,

So it would seem.  There should also be a texnansi-raw-ugmr8a.tfm.  
(There is also no need to use these "raw" files, so they are unnecessarily
complicating matters.)

    I still get exactly the same error when I run the pdftex command..

I wouldn't expect texnansi-ugmr8a to work.  The standard tfm names for
the Garamond package don't look like texnansi-<something>, but rather
ugmr<something>.  Do you have more ugmr entries in pdftex.map now?  (I
hope.)  If so, try using one of those.

(The texnansi- naming convention comes from ConTeXt, and I see a couple
of related tfm's by that name in ConTeXt, but not these particular
ones.  Hmm.)

    Does filing a bug report against gutsy sound like a reasonable thing to do?
    I mean, it sure looks to me like gutsy has installed a tfm file for a font

It looks that way to me too.

Happy typesetting,
Karl


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