Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!cica!iuvax!bsu-cs!bsu-ucs!neubauer
From: neubauer@bsu-ucs.uucp (Paul Neubauer)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Problem building font
Message-ID: <40940@bsu-ucs.uucp>
Date: 14 Sep 90 09:07:04 GMT
References: <40682@bsu-ucs.uucp> <83591@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <1471@ruunsa.fys.ruu.nl>
Organization: Ball State University, Muncie, In - Univ. Computing Svc's
Lines: 71

In article <1471@ruunsa.fys.ruu.nl>, chooft@ruunsa.fys.ruu.nl (Rob Hooft) writes:
> In <83591@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> wilcox@blob.cis.ohio-state.edu (Patricia P Wilcox) writes:
> 
>>In article <40682@bsu-ucs.uucp> neubauer@bsu-ucs.uucp (Paul Neubauer) writes:
> 
>>>I have been trying to build the IPA fonts from the ymir archives.  I have
>>>acquired all of the files and have tried to build the font files from the MF
>>>sources.  MF says it is running out of memory.  
> 
>>You haven't given us the original command you used to run Metafont, so this
>>is just a guess, but did you specify a mode (something like "mode=imagen")
>>on the command line?  If not, MF is creating huge (proof-mode) characters,
>>and may very well be running out of memory.
> 
> Is that true? In that case enlarging would help. But isn't it true that you
> included the cm base twice? I'm not a wizard too (about the same, as close as
> we have), but I saw that your startup specified the cm base, and you
> re-included it. Can that do any harm? Wizards?

Thank you both Pat and Rob.  I'll see if these suggestions lead me anywhere. 
No, I did not include "mode=something" on the command line.  I'll try that. 
The plain.bas that I was using, and on which I built cm.bas, does include the
line "localfont:=ln", which I thought was supposed to make ln (for the DEC
LN03) the default mode.  Did I misunderstand that?

On Rob's suggestion about loading cm twice, I'm not sure.  In fact, I have
tried it both using and not using "preloaded" cm and the crashes occurred at
the same place, so I doubt that that is the cause.  For reference, the commands
I used were the following:

(VMS requires that I first define what it calls "foreign commands" in order to
pass arguments to programs from the command line.  I first set the following
symbols:)

	MF :== $TEX_ROOT:[EXE] &PLAIN
	CM :== $TEX_ROOT:[EXE] &CM
	BIGMF :== $TEX_ROOT:[EXE] &BIGPLAIN

Both of the listings I put into my posting were generated using the command:

	CM WSUIPA10

However, in my testing, I also tried command lines of the form:

	MF WSUIPA10

This crashed in the same location.  Note that the difference here is  that a
different base is called for _from_the_command_line_.  The same executable is
called in either case, but it reads the command line and "preloads" the
appropriate base (noting the preloaded base in the identification "This is"
line).  Then it echoes the command line parameters:

	&cm wsuipa10

before doing anything else.  I believe that this is what made it appear to Rob
that cm was being loaded twice.  (If anyone can show me that this analysis is
wrong, please do.)  I have now also trie it with a mode specification on the
command line to see if that made a difference.  It did not.  Metafont crashed
again at the same place with the same message.  The command I used was:

	CM WSUIPA10 MODE=LN

(VMS is NOT case-sensitive.)  Thanks for these suggestions, but I am afraid I
still need some more ideas.  Does anybody have any?

Thanks in advance.

====
    Paul Neubauer    00prneubauer@bsu-ucs.uucp  or  00PRNEUBAUER@BSUVAX1.BITNET
                     neubauer@bsu-cs.uucp
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