[pdftex] Fonts

[Timothy Murphy]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 08:38:54PM +0000, Arun Kejariwal wrote:

>   Could someone let me know how to let pdflatex know to pick up fonts files 
> (like .vf .tfm etc) from a local directory, as I do not have admin 
> permission to insatll them in usr/local/... .

Somebody might answer more authoritavely,
but my understanding is that pdftex uses the same search mechanism
for finding files (of all kinds) as other parts of the TeX system.

This means that your first step is to see if your administrator
has set up TeX so that users can install their own texmf directory.
For this you must find where the main TeX tree is, perhaps /usr/share/texmf .
(You could say "kpsewhich texmf.cnf" to find where this file lives.)
If we call this $TEXMF then you have to look at $TEXMF/web2c/texmf.cnf ,
and see if HOMETEXMF is defined (or commented out).
If it is defined, probably as $HOME/texmf ,
then you have to create the directory texmf (if it does not exist),
and create a tree structure on this imitating the official tree,
eg with .sty files in $HOME/texmf/tex/latex/ .
The exact structure is defined in $TEXMF/web2c/texmf.cnf .

If HOMETEXMF is not defined you are not lost;
you can define the environment variable TEXMFCNF
to point to your own texmf.cnf .
Eg you could copy the official texmf.cnf to $HOME/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf ,
modify it to define HOMETEXMF
and "set TEXMFCNF=$HOME/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf" or whatever.

I should add that instead of the above
you could always include all the required files
in the current directory, since TeX always looks there first.

> Also, are .vf, .vpl, .tfm 
> files sufficent to use a new font or some other files like .sty are also 
> required. If yes, from where could I download those?

They are certainly not sufficient,
since they don't include the "real" font, probably *.pfb .
(You could use the bitmap fonts created from *.mf ,
but these won't be so good.
But in practice you'll probably have to use what you can find.)
Assuming you are looking for the foobar font,
you could go to one of the CTANs, say ftp.tex.ac.uk and say

ftp> quote site index foobar

But as I said, someone will probably give a more authoritative answer.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: tim at maths.tcd.ie
tel: 086-233 6090
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland