[texhax] Font installation

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2013-02-27 at 13:56:01 +0000, Lars Madsen wrote:

 > There is no need to manually mess with updmap.cfg any more
 > 
 > just make sure kpsewhich can find your map file, and then run
 > (depending on your system, as root)
 > 
 > updmap-sys --enable Map=myfonts.map
 > 
 > In the latest TL updmap has been rewritten to run a LOT faster than
 > the earlier versions.

Yes, but with an older version of updmap you can at least do:

  updmap-sys --nohash --nomkmap --enable Map=font1.map
  updmap-sys --nohash --nomkmap --enable Map=font2.map
  ....

and finally run updmap-sys without any arguments.

The two additional arguments prevent updmap from creating the final
map files and updating the ls-R files whenever you add something to
the config file.  Without these options, adding new map files would
be quite annoying.

BTW, the version of updmap we currently have in TeX Live was not
rewritten from scratch.  Since teTeX aimed to be a TeX system for
Unix, all support programs were provided as shell scripts.  Fabrice
Popineau then ported teTeX to Windows (fpTeX).  Because shell scripts
don't run on Windows, he had to port them to C or Perl.

A few years ago I was annoyed because the Unix version of updmap is so
slow.  The reason is that shell scripts call a lot of other programs
in order to do their work and creating sub-processes and moving data
around is quite expensive.  Thus I adapted the Perl script written by
Fabrice to make it work on all platforms supported by TeX Live.  It's
30 times faster than the shell script.  It was also a good opportunity
to provide a log file which allows to determine the origin of a
particular entry in the final map file, something I really missed in
the past.

Norbert recently added support for Japanese and multiple config files.
I'm sure that it was very helpful to have only one program which runs
on all platforms.  Nevertheless, it's Fabrice who deserves credits in
the first place.

For the record, the very first release of TeX Live was based on teTeX
and thus supported Unix systems only.  The second release already
supported Windows too, providing the Windows binaries from fpTeX,
compiled by Fabrice.


Ulrike,
updmap is as old as teTeX.  The first version did not have the
--enable option and users had to edit the config file manually.
A later version introduced the --enable option, but this happened
more than a decade ago.  Unfortunately I currently don't have anything
older than TeX Live 2003 installed, but I can at least confirm that
the commands described above were supported ten years ago already.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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