rokicki@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki) (02/20/90)
> Minor dvips and TeXview bugs > CC: rockicki@polya.stanford.edu No longer works (actually, it never did). Try rokicki@cs.stanford.edu. > 1. Landscape mode. > Several persons, to whom I express my thanks, have written me to > explain that in order to obtain landscape mode using dvips one must > use the option "@landscape", NOT "landscape" as stated in the manual > pages It's generally regarded as bad form to use a command-line option for landscape. Rather, the `\special{landscape}' command puts it where it belongs---in the document itself (it is a document-level decision, not a print-time decision.) Enough people seem to want it as a command line option, however, where I acquiesced and put it in. With the `current' version of dvips, you can use either `@landscape' or `landscape' as you prefer. > 2. Path problems. > I have discovered an unfortunate anomaly, fortunately easy to fix > (which I have done for myself, but which I am not distributing > because I believe that the author of these (really excellent) > programs should give the standard "fix"): Blush. > The programs dvips and TeXview both have certain paths "wired-in". > These programs look for files with certain special names, using the > directories in the path, in the order that they are given. In some > cases, these paths start with "." (the current working directory). > If you inadvertently have a file of an appropriate name in this > directory, then these programs will use it and give most surprising > and viciously hard to diagnose results. Here, a `feature'---we search the local directory first so the user can override the system defaults. > In particular, TFMPATH is the sequence of directories in which > both programs search for a TeX Font Metric file for a font. If > you happen to have such a file (not as unlikely as it may seem, > if you've been working with them), then surprising results will > occur, as they did to me, when I was testing the new Adobe fonts > (from the Font-Plus package) with TeX. (Incidentally, they work > very nicely and they include valid afm files for Helvetica-Narrow > as well as the nicer font Compressed-Helvetica.) TFMPATH is set to > .:/LocalLibrary/Fonts/TeXFonts/tfm:/usr/lib/tex/fonts/tfm Most of these can be overriden with an environment variable of the appropriate name---in this case, TEXFONTS. (I hope these are documented!) > Other paths beginning with "." are CONFIGPATH initially set > to .:/usr/lib/tex/ps and (in dvips only) HEADERPATH set to > .:/usr/lib/tex/ps . Now that's a bug; TeXview should mirror dvips as much as possible. > In addition, the paths > PKPATH=.:/LocalLibrary/Fonts/TeXFonts/pk:/usr/lib/tex/fonts/pk > and > TFMPATH=.:/LocalLibrary/Fonts/TeXFonts/tfm:/usr/lib/tex/fonts/tfm > also begin with ".". But they can be overriden by the environmental > variables TEXPKS and TEXFONTS, respectively. Oops, you're ahead of me. > 3. "Aliasing" postscript font names. > The section "More about dvips" on page 4 of the Version 1.0 Release > Notes, for TeX and Metafont state, as an example, that to use the > alias name t-rom for the Times-Roman font, you should create a TFM > file with the name t-rom.tfm and put a line of the form > Times-Roman t-rom > in the file /usr/lib/tex/ps/ps.map. Unfortunately, this is reversed > and the line should be > t-rom Times-Roman > with the alias coming first and the exact postscript font name > coming second, separated from the alias by one or more blanks. Another real (documentation) bug; thanks for the fix! I only wish we could totally dispense with the aliasing; if I want Times-Roman, I should be able to ask for it by name. > dgc > David G. Cantor > Department of Mathematics > University of California at Los Angeles > Internet: dgc@math.ucla.edu > UUCP: ...!{randvax, sdcrdcf, ucbvax}!ucla-cs!dgc