[OS X TeX] Re: problem setting paper size

[Gerben Wierda]

It turns out that the problem lies elsewhere. texconfig understands 
other comment styles fine. It is just that the file is classic mac os 
style in that it has classic line endings. texconfig, being a unix 
script, does not understand that. And it is rather difficult to change 
that, since it is a shell script using standard unix commands.

I'll add a protection statetment to the installer, before texconfig is 
being run. It does not protect you for 100% as it does not protect 
against addition of trees later on, but maybe Andrew (and others) can 
add a comment to his distribution about importing user trees.

Changing line endings to Mac OS X/unix style in a Terminal window.

	perl -pi -e "s/\r/\n/g;" ~/Library/texmf/dvips/config/config.ps
	sudo perl -pi -e "s/\r/\n/g;" 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/dvips/config/config.ps
	sudo texhash /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local

G

On Sunday, March 31, 2002, at 01:49 , Andrew Trevorrow wrote:

> Gerben Wierda wrote:
>
>>>   % sudo texconfig dvips paper letter
>>>   Password:
>>>   Error: value 'letter' not in list 'See'.
>>>   % sudo texconfig pdftex paper letter
>>>   Error: value 'letter' not in list 'See'.
>>
>> This has come up once before, and thanks to Karl, it is now clear what
>> is going on, so I'll inform all of you (and have adapted my web site
>> 'tex know how' info). It turns out that the personal texmf tree he used
>> was also used with OzTeX at some point, and OzTeX has written a
>> config.ps there that is incompatible with texconfig.
>
> I just want to make it clear that OzTeX is not the culprit.
> It cannot write a config.ps file into someone's texmf tree.
> What actually happened was that Karl put a copy of OzTeX's config.ps
> into ~/Library/texmf/dvips/config/.
>
> The real problem is that texconfig seems to assume % is the only valid
> comment character in config.ps, but dvips can recognize any of these:
>
> % space * # ;
>
> OzTeX's config.ps starts with the line "* See ..." which explains
> the above error message.  (This is not an OzTeX peculiarity -- the
> config.ps file in Tom Rokicki's vanilla dvips distribution and in
> the dvipsk distribution both use * to start comments.)
>
> I think texconfig needs to be modified to handle all cases if it's
> going to read user-supplied config.ps files.  I will modify all my
> dvips config files to use % to help avoid the problem (it's a more
> familiar comment character anyway) but there are likely to be
> people out there with their own config.ps files that use *.
>
> Andrew
>
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