Re: Creation of fonts on demand

[te@informatik.uni-hannover.de (Thomas Esser)]

> Now the question; what should I do? I thought of two possibilities:
>   - to let users create their fonts into /tmp/ somwhere
>   - to let the users create the fonts into their "." directory
> 
> Either of them is fine, though in the first case, fonts created by
> one user can be used by some other user (though this happens _very_
> seldomly).
> 
> Is there a simple way to do it? I mean, that I don't need to rewrite
> all Make* files? I'm sure that somebody out there already dealt with
> such a problem? (BTW, I can also collect the created fonts in the
> /tmp/ and put them into the system font tree).

Just use texconfig to enable the varfonts feature. Then set VARFONTS
to a directory of your choice, e.g. /tmp/texfonts or $HOME/texfonts.
Using that "offical" way has the advantage that no search paths need
to be adjusted ($VARFONTS/pk// is part of the search path for
pk files for instance).

You can also edit $TEXMF/maketex/maketex.site and redefine and of the
MT_* variables. Given the defaults of:

: ${MT_PKDESTDIR='$MT_DESTROOT/$MT_PKPART/$MT_MODE/$MT_NAMEPART'}
: ${MT_TFMDESTDIR='$MT_DESTROOT/$MT_TFMPART/$MT_NAMEPART'}
: ${MT_DESTROOT='$TEXMF/fonts'}
: ${MT_DEFAULT_NAMEPART=tmp}
: ${MT_PKPART='pk'}
: ${MT_TFMPART='tfm'}
: ${MT_TFMNAME='$NAME.tfm'}
: ${MT_PKNAME='$NAME.${DPI}pk'}

you can override and of the above, e.g. MT_DESTROOT. You can also override
all those variables in your environment. MT_NAMEPART is automatically
determined by the fontname maps. I guess that no other MakeTeX* scripts
are that configurable.

The only thing to take care of is that the destination directories
are included in the search paths in texmf.cnf.

If a user wants to override some of the defaults, e.g. MT_DESTROOT
he can do that in his environment. But then, he should take care to
include the destination directories in his search paths.

Example:
  MT_PKDESTDIR=/home/me/myfonts/pk
  PKFONTS=:$MT_PKDESTDIR
  export MT_PKDESTDIR PKFONTS

Thomas