RE: TEXMFMAIN problem in gwTeX (font installation)

[Ville Voipio <ville.voipio@kpatents.com>]

> Just for my understanding. Does texfont.pl only
> read in TEXMFMAIN or does it also write (can it
> be a search path or does it require for TEXMFMAIN
> to be just one directory)?

texfont.pl checks several places. By a very quick look
at the sources, it looks for the following:

  TEXMFMAIN
  TEXMFLOCAL
  TEXMFEXTRA
  TEXMFFONTS

It does not look for TEXMFTE, but by specifying the
switch --rootlist, it can be given a list of trees,
which it then browses through.

Ok, it might be useful to add a few here, such as
TEXMFTE (for us gwTeX users), but maybe that's an
endless road. But the real problem is really in a
font installation script which explicitly overrides
the default settings and gives a wrong tree.

---

The problem is easy to pinpoint into type-tfm.dat.
Unfortunately, just removing the explicit definitions
does not seem to solve the problem. The non-standard
root seems to be difficult to be told to the system.

For encodings, texfont.pl can be force-fed a value
which is passed to all scripts in a batch file (using
a special --en=? switch). However, no such mechanism
exists for other parameters (such as the --ro).

Tweaking the TEXMFFONTS to point to TEXMFTE is one
possibility, but then the fonts will also be installed
into TEXMFFONTS instead of TEXMFLOCAL.

Ideally, it would be nice to be able to tell the
script that the source fonts are in TEXMFWHATEVER
and they are going into TEXMFSOMETHINGELSE. I haven't
been able to figure out how to achieve that without
tailoring the batch file.

- Ville