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From: kris@diku.dk (Kristoffer H. Holm)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Rational for the location of TeX fonts
Message-ID: <KRIS.90Jul25164957@freke.diku.dk>
Date: 25 Jul 90 15:49:57 GMT
References: <114503@linus.mitre.org>
Sender: news@diku.dk (The Netnews System)
Organization: DIKU, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Lines: 54
In-Reply-To: ramsdell@linus.mitre.org's message of 24 Jul 90 15:27:19 GMT


This posting advocates standardisation & customisation of
font file locations.

John D. Ramsdell writes
> I have always wondered why TeX font files are stored in the particular
> directories given by most TeX distributions.  Consider this: the
> library directory for METAFONT contains just the data one needs to
> process METAFONT source files.  It stands to reason that the library
> directory for TeX should contain just the data one needs to process
> TeX source files, which includes TeX font metric files, but not the
> generic font files or any of the other related font formats.  Why
> aren't the fonts files for printing and previewing stored in a
> separate library directory, called say DVI, along with any other data
> required to processes DVI files?
> John

You are absolutely right, and in fact many programs expect
this. The `proper` way to do it in my opinion (at least on
un*x) is to ensure that every DVI previewer/driver looks up
an environment variable for a `:'-separated list of
directories where bitmap fonts (or ****Script, or whatever
:-) are stored.  The xdvi program (posted on comp.sources.x)
carries this a bit further by looking up both

  XDVIFONTS	`:'-separated list of directory patterns,
		where
		  %f means fontname
		  %d means magnification
		  %p means font family
		(thus the standard would be to set
		  XDVIFONTS=/usr/local/lib/tex/fonts/%f.%d%p).

  XDVISIZES	`:'-separated list of choices for %d above.

This has the added advantage of being able to have your own
additional fonts in you home directory.  It would be nice if

  .	all previewers/drivers looked in environment
	variables DVIFONTS and DVISIZES, and

  .	print spoolers made it possible for users to set up
	these variables for particular print jobs (so that
	we may still use lpr -d on BSD :-).

Hoping that someone listens :)

	
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Kristoffer H{\o}gsbro Holm			      <kris@diku.dk>
Computer Science Dept. (TOPPS group), University of Copenhagen
Universitetsparken 1, DK-2100 Copenhagen O, DENMARK    +45 31396466
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