mf nowin

[Fabrice POPINEAU]

Taco Hoekwater <taco.hoekwater@wkap.nl> writes:

    Taco> Yes, it does work as expected. It slows down mf enormously,
    Taco> though. I'd really welcome an extra 'nowin' version, because
    Taco> the windows are not really usable for debugging a font (no
    Taco> labels on the points, you need to run gftodvi to get those)
    Taco> and it would be really nice if mf could do compile those
    Taco> gf's faster. Minimizing the window helps a lot, but it's
    Taco> annoying if you have to do that all the time.

Maybe you can help me then :-) When does mf decide to open the window?
I mean, if I run 'mf cmr10' , I will get it. But not if I use mktexpk
to generate some tfm/pk file. I guess there is some
'batchmode' that prevents it from opening the window. 

No win32 gui api call is made before mf runs initscreen() . I haven't
looked at this code for some time now, but if there is any interest /
suggestion to improve it, they are welcome. I will build a mfnowin for 
testing purposes in the next release.

On another point, in order to optimize mf/mp, I translated the asm
files for ztakefraction/ztakescaled/zmakefraction/zmakescaled to
inline msvc asm. These routines are said to be faster than their C
counterparts and seem to be quite heavily used by mf/mp.

    Taco> What happened to that line-ending code?  Does it write Unix
    Taco> style files now or dos-style files?

Up to now, and as far as kpathsea/web2c is concerned, things are
read in binary mode, but written in text mode. 

/* `aopenin' is used for all kinds of input text files, so it
   needs to know what path to use.  Used by BibTeX, MF, TeX.  */
#define aopenin(f,p) open_input (&(f), p, FOPEN_RBIN_MODE)
#define aopenout(f)  open_output (&(f), FOPEN_W_MODE)

This way, you can open .log files with notepad and read them.
 
    Taco> Fabrice> - adding emtex specials to windvi
    Taco> 
    Taco> both the emtex and tpic specials are obsolete and
    Taco> non-maintained and largely undocumented and inprecise. I
    Taco> wouldn't spend time on them, especially since emtex itself
    Taco> is also no longer maintained (I think the last fixes to the
    Taco> distrib are from august '96).

What I thought was to import the emspecial.c file from dvips, or those 
part that can translate easily towars windvi. At least to be able to
display things like bmp files natively.

-- 
Fabrice