[OS X TeX] Font management with MacTeX 2013

[Michael Sharpe]

With the release of MacTeX 2013, this seems to be an opportune time to mention an alternative scheme for managing fonts, provided you are the sole TeX user on your machine and have administrative privileges. I've been using this for several weeks with the 2013 pretest, and have just verified that there are no problems with the release version either. Briefly, the scheme is to maintain a single updmap.cfg file in any convenient place outside the texmf trees (mine is ~/updmap.cfg), to which I moved the contents of all other versions of updmap.cfg except for the one maintained by the distribution in /usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/web2c. Delete all those other updmap.cfg files. Than make a symlink of your new updmap.cfg in /usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-config/web2c. The main advantage is that you now have just one "user" updmap.cfg in an easily accessed location, and you get the same effect editing it manually as by using the --enable/--disable options to updmap-sys.

I wrote up a more complete description, along with some shell scripts to create the symlink and move the file contents, as UpdmapAdvice at

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3825336/TeX/index.html

Michael