[fptex] zipped font archives

[ALAN A DUNWELL]

I like the idea as well, but keep in mind that we need a quick easy method of 
determining what fonts are available, some sort of .gz query tool either to 
show the entire font list or search for a particular font. Or does the ls-R 
show the expanded list?

Alan Dunwell


Date sent:      	Thu, 28 Feb 2002 14:50:32 +0100 (MET)
From:           	Bernd Raichle <raichle@Informatik.Uni-Stuttgart.DE>
Subject:        	Re: [fptex] new binaries
To:             	fptex@tug.org

> On Thursday, 28 February 2002 14:04:49 +0100,
> Fabrice Popineau <Fabrice.Popineau@supelec.fr> writes:
>  > * Bernd Raichle <raichle@Informatik.Uni-Stuttgart.DE> writes:
>  > 
>  > > Thus it is better to use ``balbla/filename'' in your TeX document as
>  > > usually and integrate a more or less intelligent logic in kpathsea
>  > > which uses an existing ZIP file with the name of a directory part if
>  > > there is no such directory.  A given filename ``a/b/c/d/e'' will
>  > > then result in searches for file `e' in `a/b/c/d.zip', for file
>  > > `d/e' in `a/b/c.zip', for file `c/d/e' in `a/b.zip', or file
>  > > `b/c/d/e' in `a.zip', if there is no such directory but a zip
>  > > archive ...
>  > 
>  > I like the idea, especially when you think about diskspace problems
>  > for the texlive ;-)
> 
> I like it, too.  And this idea is old.  emTeX and other TeX
> implementations on Atari ST and Amiga are using font archives files
> which includes a set of tfm or pk files.  The historical reasons for
> them were disk space (the last sector of a file is not completely
> used, if you have a lot of small files, the relation between used and
> unused sector space is low) and file name lookup in a directory (if a
> directory contains a lot of files, the speed to open a file decreases
> dramatically on MS-DOS, TOS etc.).
> 
> 
>  >                     And it is really simple to implement ! There might
>  > be few things to pay attention to like the new mktexlsr ;-)
> 
> Yes, the filename database will be a problem.  To speedup the file
> name search, `mktexlsr' has to include the contents of each ZIP file
> in an appropriate way.  Otherwise the kpathsearch lib has to search
> for a file in each possible ZIP file.
> 
> Another way is to append all possible ZIP files to the search path and
> use the ZIP table of contents as filename database.  Using this no
> changes to `mktexlsr' are needed, but the search path gets longer and
> longer with each ZIP and I don't know the speed penalty to search
> through the ZIP toc.
> 
> -bernd
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