[XeTeX] "Missing" system fonts

Sun May 27 14:40:35 CEST 2007

Dear Bruno

Thanks for all these extremely useful details about how TeXLive operates - 
I'm hoping to get to grips with it and XeTeX over the next couple of days, 
and all of your message will be of enormous help.

But EmTeX can sit on my system undisturbed, I think There is obviously some 
waste of space as it completely replicates many of the core TeX files, as 
well as copies of PSTricks, eplain, edmac, and other packages that I use. 
I'm lucky to have Y&Y's DVIWindo, which Princeton University Press kindly 
bought for me some years ago when I typeset a large edition for them (I only 
use that part of Y&Y's distribution), and I also have PCTeX though don't 
make much use of it.  Because of this replication of files there is really 
no way  (I think and hope) that EmTeX and the TeXLive distribution can 
interfere with each other, so I have the luxury of continuing with a stable 
system while I try out the new one.  I may end up making very little use of 
XeTeX except when I want to typeset oriental text - even ancient Greek I 
typeset quickly in an old DOS word processor which gives me the characters 
on screen, and convert at the last minute to an ASCII transliteration system 
of my own invention (no good for continuous typing - '\alphalenisacute' and 
other monsters!).  So for most of my work I'm not at all stuck, and I think 
it would be foolish to throw out a functioning system in the hope that one 
which doesn't (yet) work for me can be made viable.

Of course it's intellectually unsatisfying to have a suite of programs on 
the computer that I don't fully control, and for that reason I'll invest 
enough time and effort in it so that I can at least manage it competently 
when I need it.

Best

John

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bruno Voisin" <bvoisin at mac.com>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 27, 2007 10:01 AM
Subject: JunkEmail: Re: [XeTeX] "Missing" system fonts

Le 25 mai 07 à 20:32, John Was a écrit :

> There is no way that I'm going to get rid of my EmTeX distribution,
> which
> has worked soundly for many years - each year I produce six periodical
> issues, one volume of a slow-moving medieval Latin dictionary, and
> a lot
> more besides!  But it can't be causing any interference with
> TeXLive since
> it doesn't even produce any Windows registry entries (it operates in a
> 4DosShell) and moves from one computer to another just by copying
> all the
> files and directories over.  It is TeXLive that made its own
> decisions when
> I installed it, without asking me what I would have thought were some
> obvious questions about my preferred paths and working
> directories.  I'm
> sure I'll find some configuration files eventually which I can edit
> so that
> the distribution will know where I like to keep all my files.

I don't think that way of proceeding is viable in the long run. You
may end up fixing the problems you are having now, but then every
time you'll be attempting to do a new thing with your TeX setup then
you'll be facing another problem, which will take time and help to
fix, and so forth, and so forth.

TeXLive is a very wide-ranging and powerful system, and also multi-
platform, but that comes at a price: TeXLive is big, complex, some
would say bloated, command-line-oriented, and without much
flexibility. I see two problems here with respect to your EmTeX
distribution:

Problem 1
=========

TeXLive is built upon the idea of multiple texmf trees, each with a
particular function and searched in a particular order: there's a
main tree, for core (indispensable) files, a dist tree, for standard
(distribution) files, a config tree, for configuration files, a var
tree, for runtime (automatically generated at the time TeXLive is
installed or later configured) files, a local tree, for local
additions (files you add yourself); and several of these trees exist
in two versions, one at the system level (applying to all accounts on
a given PC) and the other at the user level (applying to one account
only).

All this is defined through environmental variables in a file
texmf.cnf. For example, on my Mac setup the relevant part of
texmf.cnf is in essence:

> % The tree containing the runtime files closely related to the
> specific
> % program version used:
> TEXMFMAIN = /usr/texlive/2007/texmf
>
> % The main distribution tree:
> TEXMFDIST = /usr/texlive/2007/texmf-dist
>
> % A place for local additions to a "standard" texmf tree.
> TEXMFLOCAL=/usr/texlive/2007/../texmf-local
>
> % TEXMFSYSVAR, where texconfig-sys stores variable runtime data.
> TEXMFSYSVAR=/usr/texlive/2007/texmf-var
>
> % TEXMFSYSCONFIG, where texconfig-sys stores configuration data.
> TEXMFSYSCONFIG = /usr/texlive/2007/texmf-config
>
> % User texmf trees are allowed as follows.
> TEXMFHOME=~/Library/texmf
>
> % TEXMFVAR, where texconfig stores variable runtime data.
> TEXMFVAR = ~/.texlive2007/texmf-var
>
> % TEXMFCONFIG, where texconfig stores configuration data.
> TEXMFCONFIG = ~/.texlive2007/texmf-config
>
> % Now, list all the texmf trees. If you have multiple trees you can
> % use shell brace notation, like this:
> %   TEXMF = {$TEXMFHOME,!!$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFMAIN}
> % The braces are necessary.
> TEXMF = {$TEXMFCONFIG,$TEXMFVAR,$TEXMFHOME,!!$TEXMFSYSCONFIG,!!
> $TEXMFSYSVAR,!!$TEXMFMAIN,!!$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFDIST}

The last line defines in which order all these trees are searched.

You may try to edit texmf.cnf so as to make TeXLive and EmTeX coexist
on your system, but beware: you need to really know what you're
doing. I wouldn't attempt that myself.

You can find where texmf.cnf lives on your system by using the
command kpsewhich. On my Mac:

Portable-de-Bruno:~ brunovoisin$ kpsewhich texmf.cnf
/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf

Problem 2
=========

Each texmf tree is organized according to a very intricate structure
called the TDS (TeX Directory Structure). This means each type of
file (such as BibTeX style file) is searched at a specific place
within the TDS, and at that place only, and that the place may differ
depending on the application (such as TeX, LaTeX, XeLaTeX). I don't
remember whether EmTeX was already using the TDS, maybe it already did.

The documentation of the TDS is for example <ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/
tex-archive/tds/tds.pdf>, but I would rather recommend looking at
kpathsea.pdf, the documentation of the kpathsea library used in
TeXLive to search for files. It should be somewhere within TeXLive on
your system, for me that's:

/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/doc/kpathsea/kpathsea.pdf

In particular, there's the description of the kpsewhich utility,
allowing to investigate practically everything that kpathsea does.
For example, to know where XeLaTeX will look for TeX input files and
in which order, you use:

Portable-de-Bruno:~ brunovoisin$ kpsewhich --progname=xelatex --show-
path=.tex
.
~/.texlive2007/texmf-config/tex/xelatex//
~/.texlive2007/texmf-var/tex/xelatex//
~/Library/texmf/tex/xelatex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-config/tex/xelatex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-var/tex/xelatex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/tex/xelatex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/../texmf-local/tex/xelatex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/xelatex//
~/.texlive2007/texmf-config/tex/latex//
~/.texlive2007/texmf-var/tex/latex//
~/Library/texmf/tex/latex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-config/tex/latex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-var/tex/latex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/tex/latex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/../texmf-local/tex/latex//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/latex//
~/.texlive2007/texmf-config/tex/generic//
~/.texlive2007/texmf-var/tex/generic//
~/Library/texmf/tex/generic//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-config/tex/generic//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-var/tex/generic//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/tex/generic//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/../texmf-local/tex/generic//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/generic//
~/.texlive2007/texmf-config/tex///
~/.texlive2007/texmf-var/tex///
~/Library/texmf/tex///
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-config/tex///
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-var/tex///
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/tex///
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/../texmf-local/tex///
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex///

and to know where BibTeX will look for BibTeX style files:

Portable-de-Bruno:~ brunovoisin$ kpsewhich --progname=bibtex --show-
path=.bst
.
~/.texlive2007/texmf-config/bibtex/bst//
~/.texlive2007/texmf-var/bibtex/bst//
~/Library/texmf/bibtex/bst//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-config/bibtex/bst//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-var/bibtex/bst//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/bibtex/bst//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/../texmf-local/bibtex/bst//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst//
~/.texlive2007/texmf-config/bibtex/csf//
~/.texlive2007/texmf-var/bibtex/csf//
~/Library/texmf/bibtex/csf//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-config/bibtex/csf//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-var/bibtex/csf//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/bibtex/csf//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/../texmf-local/bibtex/csf//
!!/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/bibtex/csf//

So you see how unflexible TeXLive can be in some respects: for a
given BibTeX style file to be found, it must be located inside texmf/
bibtex/bst/ within a texmf tree; just texmf/bibtex/ won't do.

Given all the above, I don't think you can get TeXLive and your
former EmTeX distribution to coexist peacefully in the long run. What
I did on the Mac when moving from Textures to gwTeX circa 2000, and
when moving from gwTeX to TeXLive in early 2007, is devote some time
seeing how the new distribution works, and then adding to this
distribution all the bits that were specific to the old distribution,
as well as all your personal additions (in-house style files, etc.),
and then remove the old distribution and use the new (customized)
distribution only. In my case the whole process (including testing)
took about one week in total, practically full-time.

For this you could use either the TEXMFLOCAL tree or the TEXMFHOME
tree. Personally I put all my local additions in TEXMFLOCAL, namely /
usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/ on my Mac.

An alternative is of course to turn instead to more user-friendly TeX
systems, for example on Windows the free MikTeX <http://miktex.org/>
or the commercial PCTeX <http://www.pctex.com/>. MikTeX is more
friendly to install than teXLive, and with PCTeX you could pay for
commercial user support. But then you'll be losing the possibility to
use XeTeX, and I think you'll have to devise yourself how to compile
it and make it work with the rest of TeX.

Bruno
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