[tex-live] dvipdfmx warnings

[Karl Berry]

Hi Bob,

    This information should be
    in the dvipdfm documentation; otherwise how is a user to know that
    using dvipdfm may require an explicit option to those packages?

And equally, how can the dvipdfm maintainers (us) possibly know what
packages need an option, let alone what that option's name should be?
Answer: we can't.  It's a matter for package authors, and presumably
changes over time.  On the other front, clearly it would be better for
all package authors to handle dvipdfm and dvipdfmx as synonyms.

We can't control any of this.  Just have to report bugs to the package
authors and hope they are responsive, as far as I can see.

However, we could add a note about "known packages needing <option> as
of <date>".  Patch to the man page (dvipdfm.1) welcome (for this and any
other issue).

    It seems dvipdfmx does the right thing when legalpaper,landscape are
    used. Wouldn't it be possible for it to suppress the frenetic but
    useless 3-line ** WARNING ** 
    message it currently produces when the user forgets to add a driver
    option to the geometry package? Or even replace it by a hint to the
    user about what to do to prevent it?

It seems to me that that warning in general serves a useful purpose, and
in fact that it helped (indirectly) in debugging in the first place.
However:

1) a patch to make the dvipdfmx warnings less "frenetic" would be
welcome, there is certainly no need for all those stars.  And/or:

2) a patch to have an option for dvipdfmx to suppress all warnings would
be welcome, and presumably easy to implement.  And/or:

3) a patch to recognize the PS code it's not recognizing, so it
doesn't need to complain, would be welcome.  And/or:

4) a patch to improve the existing message wording would be welcome.

    Ideally pdftex and dvips would do the same, though I've been told
    pdftex is "frozen"; what about dvips?

Neither pdftex nor dvips are completely frozen (and never have been).
We make small changes every year, generally in response to bug reports,
but it's improbable that any of the occasional developers (thanh, peb,
khaled, rokicki, me, ...) will take on adding a significant new feature
such as you propose.  (I've had a wishlist for years at
http://tug.org/help.html but no one, including me, has ever come forward
to do the work.)

So, there is nothing in principle against having the programs embed
type2=1c fonts (I thought I had already seen that in pdftex output
sometimes, btw), but most likely it will need you or someone else to do
the work and provide a patch.  Not trivial, I know.

k