[OS X TeX] Re: MacTeX-2008; download sites and some answers

[Dr. Clea F. Rees]

Thanks very much to Richard Koch for taking the time to respond in
detail to my laundry list of questions on top of everything else.

> On Sep 1, 2008, at 1:45 PM, Dr. Clea F. Rees wrote:
>
>> I notice that the new MacTeX includes various things which were
>> previously packaged separately and/or handled differently. For example,
>> Ghostscript and ImageMagick.
>> 
>> This prompts a couple of questions (trying to satisfy my curiosity in the 
>> absence of an installer to dissect):
>> 
>> 1.	Will the installer overwrite installations in /usr/local?
>
> These additions are in subpackages, so by using custom install, you can 
> choose to install some and keep old versions of others. The answer to the 
> specific question is "yes." In the case of Ghostscript, this should cause 
> absolutely no problems. Go to
>
>    www.uoregon.edu/~koch
>
> for a document explaining exactly how the Ghostscript package works and why 
> it is essentially the same as Gerben's version.

Ah, yes. But some of use already replaced Gerben's version and now have
other software which relies on that installation! I am actually using
8.63 at this point and probably tweaked the configure options. But it
sounds as though custom installing will let me keep using that
installation just fine. Excellent.

> In the case of ImageMagick, we install a very small subset of what Gerben 
> installs, and we don't touch his shared libraries. So I think the essential 
> effect is to replace his "convert" with ours.

Again, I've got a custom installation at this point which other
software relies on so I'll need to persuade MacTeX   to play nicely
with it. It sounds as if that should be pretty easy, though.

>> Possibly not a matter for MacTeX/texlive...
>> 6.	What is the current status/likely future of gtamacfonts?
>> 7.	Is anybody extending it/interested in extending it?
>
> By very specific choice, MacTeX installs the full TeX Live EXACTLY with no 
> additions and no subtractions. So gtamacfonts is not included. Making a 
> package to install gtamacfonts for TeX Live would be a good project for 
> someone else. Note that gtamacfonts presents copyright problems in the sense 
> that it takes Apple copyrighted fonts and configures them so TeX can use 
> them. This isn't a problem in i-Installer because i-IInstaller takes the 
> user's own copy of the fonts and applies the font utilities on the spot. But 
> you couldn't, for example, just convert the fonts and then put them in an 
> install package. So you'll have to repeat some of what Gerben did, including 
> installing font utilities.

I just wondered because I spent quite a lot of time playing with fonts
in LaTeX and figured out ways to get various fonts to work as I wanted
them to. I have no idea about packaging things, however. That is, I
know how to convert and install the fonts (though certainly not as
expertly as Gerben et al did it) but wouldn't have a clue how to wrap
it up to make it work on somebody else's machine. Also, I only did it
for LaTeX because that's what I'm familiar with.

So not very useful really!

Thanks,
cfr