[OS X TeX] Fonts and PSNFSS

Michael S. Hanson mshanson at wesleyan.edu
Sat Jun 12 18:32:46 EDT 2004


	Just to elaborate on Bruno's suggestion, after I tried it myself....

On Jun 12, 2004, at 4:49 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 12 juin 04, à 19:44, Alain Schremmer a écrit :
>
>> In fact, I had suspected that the package must have been i-installed 
>> but I had no idea how to go about checking whether it had and what 
>> had happened to it.
>
> A more practical, second-thought answer: let's assume you see the 
> package pifont mentioned, and you would like to check whether it's 
> installed and where. Go to the Finder, then:
>
> - Open a window and navigate to /Library/ (it's displayed under a 
> localized name in the Finder, for example "Bibliothèque" in French), 
> make sure teTeX appears as one of its sub-directories.

	On my setup, teTeX appears as an alias, which one can identify by the 
little curved arrow badge on the lower-left corner of the folder 
icon....

	By the way, there are (at least) two Library directories on your Mac.  
The slash in front of "/Library" means you want the one that is a 
subdirectory from your hard drive icon, not the one that is a 
subdirectory from your home directory (which is denoted ~/Library, ~ 
being a shorthand for "your home directory").  This is an important 
subtle point to those new to OS X, as *both* /Library and ~/Library may 
have teTeX subdirectories -- but the files in question most likely will 
only be found in /Library.


> - In the File menu, select Find… (Cmd-F).
>
> - Drag the teTeX directory to the white area inside the Find window 
> that appears. It will add this directory to those (Documents, iDisk, 
> etc.) already available by default for the search.

	In order to see the "white area" in the Find window, one must have 
"Specific places" selected in the "Search in:" drop-down menu.  (Sorry, 
don't know what that would translate to in French.)  If this is the 
first time you have done this, only your hard drive icon (with a check 
box to the left) will be listed there.


> - Check teTeX and uncheck the other directories.
>
> - In the pop-up menus below this white area, select "Visibility" in 
> the first and "Visible and Invisible Elements" in the second.
>
> - Then press the "+" button which will allow to add one more search 
> criterion, and select "The name" "Starts with" (for example) and type 
> the name of the file to search for, here "pifont.sty".
>
> You're done, you will search for the file "pifont.sty" inside the 
> directory /Library/teTeX/ where the TeX distribution lives.

	And, in my experience, you won't find anything.  I don't know if it is 
specific to my Mac or not, but following these instructions turned up 
nothing.

	However, I was able to find 'pifont.sty' once I replaced the alias to 
the teTeX directory with its original.  (In the directory list in the 
Find window, the original will not have the little arrow badge.)  A 
cursory glance at the Terminal suggests that this is a Unix symbolic 
link and not a Mac alias, and that may account for the failure -- 
although I'm really just guessing here.

	To place the original directory instead of the alias in the Find 
window, first select the alias icon for /Library/teTeX in the Finder.  
Then type <Command>-R or select "Show Original" from the File menu in 
the Finder.  Then drag the actual (badge-less) folder icon to the Find 
window as above.  Now the above steps *will* reveal the 'pifont.sty' in 
the Finder, at 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/latex/psnfss/pifont.sty .

	Switching between the alias for teTeX and the actual folder in the 
Find window seems to confirm that the Finder has trouble with the 
alias.  This is on a PowerBook running 10.3.4 with all the latest 
security updates.


> PS There are command-line tools like "locate" or "find" that allow to 
> do this from Terminal.app, but personally (being a "Rest of Us" 
> person) I prefer the Finder way.

Actually, I must confess to using the 'find' command in Terminal after 
the initial Finder search with the aliased directory failed.  For the 
curious (Unix gurus should tune out now), I typed the following in the 
Terminal:

	cd /Library/teTeX

Note that even though this is a symbolic link, Unix commands will treat 
it as if it were the actual directory.  (In apparent contrast with the 
Find command in the Finder....)  Next I typed:

	find . -name pifont.sty

Here, 'find' is the command, '.' is a shorthand for 'this directory' 
(and subdirectories by default with the find command), '-name' is an 
option to find by name ('man find' in the Terminal will reveal a number 
of other options), and 'pifont.sty' is the name of the file to find.

The 'locate' command is even easier:  just type

	locate pifont.sty

in any directory, and it will quickly show up -- provided your Mac has 
been left to run over night (not off or sleeping) so that it can built 
and update this database.

Finally, since you are looking for a TeX file, you could always type

	kpsewhich pifont.sty

which also will find the file in the appropriate directory.


	Hope this helps as well!

                                         -- Mike

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