[tex-live] .enc, .map and texmf.cnf

Thomas Esser te at dbs.uni-hannover.de
Sat Feb 21 09:33:12 CET 2004


> many thanks for your detailed (and clear, as usual) answer.

Well, you and everybody else deserve this level of information. I can't
just change such things and then be quiet with explanations :-)

> Yes, but for average user it could be not easy to undestand why
> .map files are no more searched along TEXPSHEADERS. The new 

For dvips, this was never true. map files have been searched along
TEXCONFIG. pdftex has used TEXPSHEADERS, but this was a bug. Nobody
really noticed this, however, until we made this change.

In dvips, map file access was done in a single place in the source which
was only used to access map files and this could be changed easily. The
downloading code, however, has a single place for downloading enc /
type1 / prologues.  One cannot easily change this from TEXPSHEADERS to
a different search path. Instead, it has to be split up.

BTW: gsftopk uses the same technique as dvips. But, I hope that we can
just adopt the new code in dvips for gsftopk as well (as soon as we
have it).

Until then, dvips and gsftopk have to have this ugly TEXPSHEADERS
search path. After we have taken enc / type1 out, TEXPSHEADERS no longer
needs to look at texmf/fonts at all.

> % Font encoding files (.enc) for pdfTeX.
> (I didn't checked where dvipdfm searches .enc ;-)

We also have mktexpk (for helping ps2pk), dvipdfm, dvipdfmx and xdvi
which look at the new path. Maybe, the comment should better be:

  % Font encoding files (.enc); some applications might still use
  % TEXPSHEADERS for this.

The same is true for T1FONTS fonts, and this for quite a long time.

Thomas


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