dgc@joshua.math.ucla.edu (02/19/90)
Minor dvips and TeXview bugs
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
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"):
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.
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
Other paths beginning with "." are CONFIGPATH initially set
to .:/usr/lib/tex/ps and (in dvips only) HEADERPATH set to
.:/usr/lib/tex/ps .
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.
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.
In the file /usr/lib/tex/fonts/tfm one should create the file
t-rom.tfm by the command
ln Times-Roman.tfm t-rom.tfm.
This, with the apropriate modifications, must be done for each
postscript font which is to be aliased.
dgc
David G. Cantor
Department of Mathematics
University of California at Los Angeles
Internet: dgc@math.ucla.edu
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