[tex-live] Some (minor) users' problems with TeXLIve 2005

[Karl Berry]

Hi John,

    * The 'picins' package has been dropped since TeXLive 2004; which is
    fair enough, since CTAN classifies it as a LaTeX 2.09 offering

Yes, it was CTAN's moving the package that prompted me to drop it, as I
recall.  People still use 2.09, huh?  I suppose I could reinstate it,
but since you said picinpar is a good replacement, might as well not?

    Things seem to have changed this year, 

They did?  What happened?  I do have some vague memory of a report
(probably from you :) along these lines, but I can't find the actual
changes.

    In previous years, the problem seemed to be that the file b-bold.mf was
    missing from the collection of Sauter Metafonts in

Isn't it b-bbold.mf?  I see that on CTAN and in teTeX.

With b-bbold.mf present, I thinkmktexmf should be able to generate bbold11.mf.
It does this to get the fundamental info:
sauterroot=`kpsewhich b-$rootname.mf 2>/dev/null`
(followed by a bunch of special cases.)

Can you try that out?

   * It's amazing how much of the users' own material uses
   \ifx\pdfoutput \undefined

I'm not surprised.  Virtually every recent TUGboat article did that,
too.  It was the recommended test since day 1.  As everyone reading this
list is bored of hearing about by now, I never did like the decision to
incompatibly change it.  Nothing to be done now, though.

Thanks,
Karl