rankin@scubed.UUCP (Tom Rankin) (09/16/88)
I recently ftp'd the software from ics.uci.edu to perform the web-to-c (web2c) conversion and creation of TeX, LaTeX and SLiTeX. I am a user of LaTeX, but beyond that, my knowledge of the inner workings of TeX and the .sty and .fmt files, etc. is quite rudimentary. I barely know enough to be dangerous. As a result, the following question is spawned (at least in part) from ignorance. Oh well, the potential for enlightenment is, no doubt, greater. I was successful in generating tangle, weave, the web2c translator, and, in fact, everything except for SLiTeX. I was using the fonts and macros which accompanied our previous distribution (TeX82 from University of Washington). This appeared to cause no problem for TeX and LaTeX, but during the generation of splain.fmt (for SLiTeX), a whole raft of fonts could not be found. The splain.fmt file can still be created, however, the missing fonts definitely effect the processing of SLiTeX documents. Some margin of success is achieved by commenting all of the invisible (i*) fonts from the sfonts.tex file but there are still some oddball fonts (like cmsss8...three s's??? and circle*) which cannot be located. Naturally I tried to snag a new-up-to-date sfonts.tex, this time from score.stanford.edu. Although there was no cmsss8 font in that version of sfonts.tex, a number of (apparently) critical fonts are still missing. By the way, if it matters, when I try to process a SLiTeX document using the crippled splain.fmt, the SLiTeX portion works without complaint, however, dvi2ps complains that it is substituting fonts at 200 mag for the 450 mag it wants. Incidentally, this does not appear to be the am* font problem already discussed here. None of the versions of my sfonts.tex file contains references to am* fonts. I have attempted, halfheartedly, to obtain brand new sets of macros and fonts, however, I cannot seem to locate a full set of fonts. At least nothing *looks* like as full a set as what we have already. It is difficult, at best, to look around via ftp and feel as though you have looked under all the rocks (so to speak). Furthermore, I cannot seem to locate any discussion of fonts and/or macros -- no documentation or READMEs seem to exist (that I have found). Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated -- particularly about where I can find information to educate myself on the interactions of the driver files (like sfonts.tex), .fmt file, fonts, etc and how the TeX software uses all these players. AdTHANKSvance, Tom Rankin