[OS X TeX] teTeX (Weirda + fink system-tetex) cannot build fonts

[Michael Betsch]

>I'm new to Macs, from 14+ years with SunOS and Solaris.  I'm not 
>sure if these problems are my goofs or fundamental misconfigurations 
>in the packages I've installed.
>
>To run LyX, I installed XDarwin, OroborOSX, Weirda's teTeX 
>installation, the fink system-tetex placeholder, and xdvi from fink. 
>All installed and configured without protest.  But when I run xdvi, 
>it seems to search for fonts in the wrong trees, and hence cannot 
>find the VFFONTS.  The result is that mktexpk does not build the 
>needed fonts for xdvi.
>
>As far as I can tell, it is searching in /var/tmp/texfonts instead 
>of in /usr/local/teTeX/texmf and /usr/local/teTeX/texmf.local -- and 
>I'm stumped.
>
>I'd welcome suggestions of how to get this right.  Thanks,

You should not install two different TeX distributions on the same 
machine. GW's teTeX will do fine alone, but if you have two parallel 
TeX installations, they will mess up each other's configurations, 
environment variables etc. Very probably even this "placeholder" is 
enough to cause trouble. Maybe however you would need to reconfigure 
xdvi and compile it (remove all TeX before and install only one TeX). 
I have compiled xdvi from sources on my machine and it works and 
calls GW's teTeX (however xdvi runs rather slowly). BTW, there is a 
good "OS X only" dvi viewer (MacDviX) which would save you the 
overhead of running the X environment. Most other TeX environments 
for OS X produce PDF output (either via pdftex or via ps2pdf) which 
they display through the OS X pdf display functions; but there is 
also a ready-to-run emacs configured to call TeX-related programs. I 
find that as long as you do not need software that runs only on 
XDarwin it is worth the effort to avoid using the X Server as long as 
possible.

Michael Betsch
-- 

_______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Michael Betsch                                              privat:
SFB 441, Projekt B1
Nauklerstraße 35                                     Rappenberghalde 27
72074 Tübingen                                           72070 Tübingen
Tel. 07071/29-77161                                    Tel. 07071/51917
email: Michael.Betsch at uni-tuebingen.de
_______________________________________________________________________

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