[texhax] What has happened to PLTOTF???

[Pierre MacKay]

Pierre MacKay wrote:

>I recently tried to check something by running tftopl and then running 
>pltotf. 
>
>The two programs are identified as "Nihongo" 
>
>tftopl gives what looks like a valid PL file.  There are no oddities in 
>the file as viewed in emacs, but I cannot make a TFM out of that file. 
>
>pltotf appears to run alright, but I when I check the resulting TFM, 
>using tftopl again,
>I get
>
>tftopl -verbose murr-nep10e.tfm jjunk.pl
>This is Nihongo TFtoPL, Version 3.2-p1.5 (Web2C 7.4.5)
>process kanji code is euc.
>The file has fewer bytes than it claims!
>Sorry, but I can't go on; are you sure this is a TFM?
>
>I have tried with some well established TFM files so that I know that 
>they are valid
>and I cannot get a correct result with tftopl -> pltotf -> tftopl. 
>
>This is a very serious hole in TeX support ware.
>  
>
The problem lies in the handling of the

(CODINGSCHEME XXXXENCODING + ASEXENCODING)

string

If I change that to
(CODINGSCHEME XXXENCODING + ASEXENCODING)

two binary bytes change.  There is a ^Z instead of ^[ before the string 
in the
TFM which is entirely reasonable, and there are 13 binary zero bytes 
after the string in the second instance, but only 12 after the first 
instance.  That too seems not unreasonable.  But the second instance 
fails completely, although I have used a binary "compare-windows" in 
emacs to show that from that string of binary zeros on, the two files 
(the good and the bad one) are precisely identical.

No matter what arbitrary changes I make in the CODINGSCHEME string, I 
cannot get pltotf to produce a valid TFM. 

Incidentally, where does the "Nihongo" string come from? 

I recompiled from the sources on the 2004 TeX collection CTAN partition, and the problem went away.


Pierre MacKay
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