Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs and font caches

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 09:47:09PM +0100, Ralf Treinen wrote:
> currently, TeXmacs stores pk and tfm files in the users's home
> directory,  that is in $TEXMACS_HOME_PATH/fonts/{tfm,pk}. Is there
> any particular reason for this? On a reasonably configured system,
> mktexpk and mktextfm use a system-wide cache directory
> for this (on debian this is /var/cache/fonts, which is the 
> location defined for this purpose by the File Hierarchy Standard).

The problem is that many systems are *not* reasonable
(i.e. redhat and fedora) and the harm of not being able to generate
a font in these cases is larger than the one of regenerating fonts
for each user. This behaviour was changed recently, after I noticed
that I could not use TeXmacs on several machines at the free software
meeting in Dijon this summer.

> I recently had a debian user complain about this behaviour of
> TeXmacs' (he is right). Using a system-wide cache directory
> has the advantage that generated fonts are shared with other
> programs (like TeX) and/or with other users on the same
> machine. The patch would look something like the one attached.
> Does anyone see problems with changing TeXmacs' behaviour in
> this sense?

Anyway, we now use Type 1 fonts as much as possible,
so the problem should be less acute. I therefore insist on
creating a dependency on the extra font package with Type 1 fonts.

Best wishes, Joris