TeX 1995 July/TeX CD-ROM July 1995 (Disc 1)(Walnut Creek)(1995).ISO/tex-k/tex-k-archive.past/tex-k-archive.gz/tex-k-archive/[e-mail]_Sat Oct 16 21:42:19 1993.msg

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Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1993 11:42:19 +1000
From: [e-mail] (Peter Williams)
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Subject: Problem/Stangeness With DVIPSK 5.519b and XDVIK 1.3

I am in the process of installing the above programs on an 486 machine
running Linux (UNIX type) operating system and I am experiencing strange
behaviour with building missing fonts.

On the earlier version (5.515) of DVIPSK, when a font was not found, MakeTeXPK
was called and the font was built while DVIPSK waited and the job was
completed successfully. While this happened METAFONT progress reports were
displayed.

On this version what seems to be occuring is that the font is being built
SILENTLY and DVIPSK is not waiting until the font is built before
proceeding. This means that the job finishes with blanks where characters
from the missing font should be. Running the job again is then successful.

I have made a quick and dirty fix by putting a loop around the
pkfile=pksearch instruction in pkopen in loadfont.c which waits until
pkfile != 0. This allows the construction of the fonts to catch up and
usually only needs one iteration. OOPS, I almost forgot, this problem only
seems to occur on the second and subsequent missing fonts. I realize that
this fix is unsatisfactory in the long run and may cause problems that I have
not foreseen.

The same thing happens with XDVIK 1.3 but I have not made any kludge fixes
there as I can live with running it twice.

Peter Williams
[e-mail]