[OS X TeX] Fonts and PSNFSS

[Alain Schremmer]

Hold on!
I went back to the email to which the file had been attached and, indeed 
there was a pdf as well as tex. When I tried to typeset the tex file 
something entirely different happened. I won't say because I don't want 
to take up more of anybody's time at this point.
I apologize for pushing the panic button too soon and too often.
Regards
--schremmer

Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 12 juin 04, à 19:44, Alain Schremmer a écrit :
>
>> Thanks very much.
>>
>> Please don't bother with this any further. (I would hate to see how 
>> much you would be able to write were you /not/ short of time.)
>>
>> The reason is that I do not really need pifont in my writing (or will 
>> I?) and that I did this mostly as an exercise because I hate to be 
>> helpless. Certainly not because I wanted to upgrade from 9.0a. What 
>> must really have happened can only be due to my general incompetence 
>> (can't, won't, use the term I used previously as it got me, 
>> privately, berated). 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.
>>
>> When I wanted to typeset the file I had been given as a sample for my 
>> instruction, I got
>>
>>    !Undefined control sequence <recently read> \c at lor@to at ps
>>    1.41 \psset at bordercolor(white)
>>    ?
>>
>> and when I did goto error the following was highlighted.
>>    \usepackage{pifont} %%for the dingautolists and the proofsymbol
>
>
> Well, that's not an easy one to debug, unless you've got some 
> experience with LaTeX already! LaTeX's error message are often 
> unhelpful, as they point to a line where the error becomes blatant, 
> even if the error was actually created by another instruction several 
> lines earlier.
>
> I think the most likely cause for what you experienced is that you 
> compiled in pdfTeX mode a document that included the line:
>
> \usepackage[dvips]{graphics}
>
> or
>
> \usepackage[dvips]{color}
>
> or has a [dvips] option somewhere (or an option corresponding to 
> another driver than [pdftex], like [textures], [truetex] or [vtex]).
>
> How to debug this: I used BBEdit to do a multifile search for 
> "c at lor@to at ps" over the whole directory 
> /Library/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/latex/, it returned the name of 
> several files inside 
> /Library/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/latex/graphics/, including in 
> particular dvips.def, textures.def, etc.
>
> It may also be that your document uses the changebar package, and that 
> this package uses the option [dvips] by default. Or that it uses the 
> pstricks package, since searching for "psset at bordercolor" returns only 
> the file 
> /Library/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/latex/graphics/pstcol.sty which 
> is said to provide "PSTricks color colompatibility".
>
> How to solve the problem: replace the [dvips] option by [pdftex], or 
> simply erases it (I think TeXShop has a way of figuring out by itself 
> which option to use), or typeset in TeX + Ghostscript mode instead of 
> pdfTeX. In case your document uses the pstricks package, then the TeX 
> + GhostScript mode is the only solution.
>
> Generally if the error message mentions a command with "ps" in its 
> name, it's reasonable to try the TeX + Ghostscript mode and see 
> whether it cures things.
>
>> P. S. In looking up things, I found a folder that seems to have 
>> remained from my ill-fated attempt to command Fink to install 
>> iTeXMac, before I i-installed TeXshop.
>> It is called sw, right next to the system, and contains  bin, etc, 
>> fink, include, lib, sbin, share, src, var. Is it harmless or should I 
>> do something about it?
>
>
> Unless you use Fink for other purposes, you can simply throw away the 
> /sw/ directory. But there's also something trickier to do, which goes 
> beyond my competence: Fink modifies the default path used by the 
> system, by placing, in this path, its directories for executables 
> /sw/bin/ and /sw/sbin/ before those where the system executables live, 
> i.e. /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin. You can see all these 
> directories, for example, by opening Terminal and typing:
>
> cd /
> ls -l
>
> which will show what's really on your disk.
>
> So there is somewhere a file where Fink stores this path setting, I 
> don't know which one it is as I don't use Fink myself. For TeX, 
> specific settings are placed by i-Installer inside 
> /private/etc/csh.login, maybe Fink uses this file too or some other 
> file. *Beware*: if that's indeed this file, do not attempt to modify 
> it unless you're absolutely positively sure of what's you're doing; 
> making an error at this stage may render you Mac completely unusable 
> and force you to reinstall everything (OS, TeX, really everything). As 
> the path says, these are really "private" OS directories (which is 
> probably why Apple hides them so carefully in the Finder).
>
> So what's needed at this stage from somebody more knowledgeable than 
> me is:
>
> - in which file Fink stores its path settings;
>
> - what to do to change these settings back to their original OS X 
> defaults.
>
> Bruno Voisin
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