[texhax] pdflatex problem resolved

[Michael Barr]

As a followup to the question I asked yesterday and trying to understand
what Luca Turchetti said, I looked closely at the log file.  The crucial
file seems to be the file pdftex.map.  When I searched, there were two
copies of this file, one in the directory
c:/TeXLive8/texmf/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/
and the second in
c:/TeXLive8/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/
The first one consists of 5180 lines and the second of one three line
comment to the effect that one must not try to edit it, but run updmap.
I tried running updmap, but it couldn't find updmap.cfg (which also
exists, also once in each tree, but evidently this utility doesn't use
kpathsea).  Rather than try to sort out the syntax of how to tell the
prgram where the configuration file was and trying to guess which tree
it would work on, I simply copied the large map file to the other one.
But this whole episode is bizarre.  Why is there so much duplication on
these two trees and how does the TeX engine decide which tree to follow.
It is not in ls-r since each tree has its own copy.  Although I think I
understand TeX reasonably well, I don't know a thing about how the whole
package operates.

Michael Barr