[tex-eplain] Is there a list of fonts usable by TeX alone, or aTeX command to return names?

[terry.s at Safe-mail.net]

Hello,

> > "`dvipdfmx:fatal: CFF: Inconsistent DICT argument number.
> 
> I have no idea what this message means.  Can you view the DVI file?  Does dvips work?  Have you checked the dvips or dvipdfmx documentation? 

DSSerif is the font that *was* found by "tex" compile. There's no DVI file because on this font, it's "dvipdfmx" that throws the DICT error.

>For converting DVI to PS or PDF, you need the pk files.  This isn't part of TeX;  TeX itself isn't concerned with PostScript.

You know, in another post (another-engine related) someone mentioned that (said engine) didn't care about the fonts, but the DVI driver does. It may be that if the '.pd' files are missing, TeX can't use them, and DVI needs '.pk' files and also can only deal with certain fonts? So I maybe need to investigate the driver, too. It even mentioned tex/other(?) may throw *FALSE* "tfm" error, I'll have to look it up again.

> What program isn't finding the TFM file?  It may be that kpathsea isn't finding it.  The paths for finding TeX-related files are defined in texmf.cnf files.  I suggest checking the kpathsea documentation.

Thank you, I will do that. I DO remember having to do something with *kpathsea* to use MiKTeX a couple years ago. I think that is the first thing to try, and thank you for reminding me.

Another (XeTeX) post on StackExchange reveals TeX may only use system fonts by NAME, TeX Live fonts by filename, but I'm not sure about that. Also, the regarding Karl's code:

\font\1="Liberation Serif" % quotes are required
{\1 This is Liberation Serif.}

I finally noticed while working through the list (we should still have many fonts in common) that ERRORS ONLY REFERENCE 1 WORD ("Liberation" et. al) --- I must use {}s, not ""s, around a name. But I still get the same error, just with the correct names.

> As far as I know, "font map" isn't a concept from TeX.  Fonts work the way I've explained or given examples for.  "FM" in "TFM" stands for "font metric" and "T" presumably for TeX, although as I remember, this isn't explicitly stated in _The TeXbook_.  I could be wrong about this.

I assume or have read the same, '.tfm' = TeX font metric. As for font maps ... I think those are for the *driver*! (I don't know, maybe for both, defining glyphs for each slot.) Anyway, it seems many fonts are NOT installed for plain TeX, but for additional formats/engines/packages, or maybe a lot are just lying around, distributed but not installed.

> I have found when fonts are specifically designed for use with LaTeX and it's assumed that one loads a particular package in order to use them, it is often impractical to use them with plain TeX because one would have to define a lot of \chardefs. 

YUK!

> I question whether it makes sense to use TeX to imitate the appearance of documents formatted using MS Word or whatever other packages are available for typesetting documents nowadays.

Computer Modern may be lovely in print, and superior for math, but it's horrible on the eyes on a computer screen. But I'm having problems specifying ANY font except the "cm" variants/sizes which work out of the box ... thank you for the hints as to what to investigate! Also, for scientific reports that desire consistency, or articles in a journal where you don't control the font, anyway, it's understandable. But for other documents or individual books --- especially books --- one desires a more polished, modern (or old), attractive appearance; fonts and whitespace are the hugest-impact choices one could make.

FWIW, I also tried the "font-ch"/"font-change" package for plain TeX (uses \input), though it's old (2013?). It has 49 macros for specific fonts with corresponding '.tex' source for each. However, the source must be copied to the document dir, and it still didn't work for me (that's probably due to "kpathsea"/"dvipdfmx" issues. Some parts of the package are still very useful: it provides spelled-out macros for more than 3 sizes (e.g. \fourteenpoint), many additional symbols, and some oddball stuff. It's also supposed to give you \slbf and similar, but that's broken.

There are "otftotfm" (CLI converter that looks promising) and other type-specific packages, and someone says they use "fontforge" to convert PostScript fonts --- I think that's a Linux-only program, but I'll have to check it out. It's free. It goes without saying that "kpathsea" and the "dvipdfmx" docs are my priority.

There were also tips to help "fontspec" find and use fonts on LaTeX via custom `.fontspec' or `.xml' files, which actually look pretty simple and I will test on LaTeX later (I probably still want to use LaTeX or some documents).

There's a lot of loosely-realated stuff in this email, and some is partially outdated, but I'll try running a "kpathsea" update before I test more.

Thank you!
Terry S.