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

[John Murdie]

Karl Berry wrote on Mon Jan 30 19:38:32 CET 2006:
________________________________________________________________________
> 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?

Though I can't be sure that picinpar is a complete replacement for
picins, I tend to agree - I've managed without picins all this time. By
the way, the TeXLive 2005 bugs list overstates the problem - though
written for LaTeX 2.09, picins (has been modified so that it) works fine
with the current LaTeX.

>     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.

Sorry, yes - that name is what I meant to write. My main question is:
has it been deliberately omitted from the Sauter Metafonts in the
TeXLive distribution or not?

> 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?

I added b-bbold.mf and deleted the copy of bbold11.mf I added manually
(a copy of bbold10.mf) and also the pk and tfm files generated as a
result of that:
$VARTEXMF/texfonts/pk/ljfour/jknappen/sauter/bbold11.657pk and
$VARTEXMF/texfonts/tfm/jknappen/sauter/bbold11.tfm,

but things (the disposition of the Metafont files) seem to have changed
this year as I said, so my next step of changing
$TEXMF/fonts/source/jknappen/sauter/bbold11.mf thus:

2c2
< input bbold;
---
> input b-bbold;

isn't possible because that file no longer exists.

But that last doesn't seem necessary, either - my problem was that my
texfonts directory had not had a 'sources' sub-directory created in it
with permissions drwxrwxrwt; once I did that, the presence of b-bbold.mf
allowed mktexmf to do the trick.

Perhaps what is needed is for the TeXLive installation script to make
sure that $VARTEXMF/texfonts and all its needed sub-directories exist
with appropriate permissions?

Thanks Karl,

John A. Murdie