[OS X TeX] Simple(?) MacTeX question

[Gerben Wierda]

On Sep 11, 2006, at 05:01, Rowland McDonnell wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've got MacTeX installed, and I'm trying to find out what exactly I've
> got installed.
>
> I see I've got these things installed:
>
> ImageMagick
> fontforge
> libwmf
> freetype
>
> Could some kind person explain briefly what these things are used for
> with MacTeX?  I've tried to find some documentation which explains, but
> I've drawn a blank.

ImageMagick is a very popular suite of command line tools to convert 
graphic formats. On the command line there are manual pages for these 
tools. "man ImageMagick" will give you a short overview. One of the 
most often used commands is "convert". "man convert" will give you its 
manual page. ImageMagick  has a web site: http://www.imagemagick.org. 
There also is a Wikipedia entry 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagemagick. I know next to nothing of 
ImageMagick, just that I can use the convert utility to do all sorts of 
bitmap image conversions and translations (formats, scaling, cropping, 
etc.). If these terms mean nothing to you, you probably do not need the 
tool, except for the following scenario:

You have a TIFF file, but pdfTeX does not support TIFF anymore since 
2004 (TIFF is not well defined I have been told and the support has 
been dropped). You want to include the TIFF file in your .tex document. 
You can go to the command line ans say "convert foo.tiff foo.png" and 
the convert tool will convert foo.tiff from TIFF to PNG format and 
write foo.png, which can be included as image in .tex documents.

FontForge (the binary is called "fontforge") is a font manipulation 
tool for unix-like systems. It can work command line withg its own 
programming language and it can work screen oriented within the X11 
windowing environment. It can also be used to convert fonts, e.g. to 
convert Type1 fonts to truetype fonts. There is a Wikipedia entry: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FontForge.

libwmf is a support library for Windows MetaFile operations and some 
other programs are linked dynamically against this library, which means 
that it needs to be installed for those other programs to work. Think 
of it as part of the functionality of a binary living in another file 
(the dynamic or 'shared' library). I think ImageMagick used to be 
linked dynamically but it hasn't been for a while because there are 
problems with ImageMagick and libwmf support. Newer releases of 
ImageMagick may again come with WMF support via libwmf so it is smart 
to have it installed.

freetype is likewise a dynamic or shared library of (in this case) font 
functions fo OpenType fonts. Other programs need this to be installed, 
e.g. ImageMagick.

I would start reading Wikipedia. I do not know all the specifics 
myself, I just repackage them for easy installation.

G

>
> Also: I don't seem able to get TeXShop 2.09d to print a dvi file.
> Double-clicking (for example) tb1401.dvi (part of the Babel
> documentation) gives me a pdf version of the dvi file, but the `Print'
> command doesn't do a thing when I try it.  MacOS X 10.4.7, quad G5.
> (printing does generally work on that Mac in question).
>
> Does anyone have any ideas what I might try?
>
> Rowland.
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>

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