[OS X TeX] Re: Simple(?) MacTeX question

[Maarten Sneep]

On 12-sep-2006, at 4:45, Rowland McDonnell wrote:

>> FontForge and Fondu Mac Font Tools
>> - Needed to convert the Latin Modern fonts into Mac OS X compatible
>> font packages. This is done during the i-Installer run, and (AFAIK)
>> not during the MacTeX install run. I don't think the Mac OS X Gui
>> Latin Modern fonts get installed with MacTeX. Can someone confirm?
>
> Aha!  Thanks!
>
> Is there any benefit for me in having these available in the usual Mac
> GUI?  I can't see much, if any - I don't really use Mac GUI founts for
> anything except displaying information on screen, and I speak one
> language only, so the only accent I really `need' is a dieresis.

Depends on what you use LaTeX for I think. If you include graphs or  
illustrations that contain text, _and_ you use the Computer Modern  
fonts for your documents, _and_ you use a GUI application to create  
the illustrative material, _then_ the GUI fonts might be useful for  
matching text and illustrations.

Beyond that, no, not really. The fonts are not easily readable on  
screen, so reading your mail in lmtt is not a serious option.

>> CM-Super
>> - Outline versions of the Computer Modern fonts in T1 and some other
>> encodings, including Cyrillic.
>
> Okay - but they don't `just work'.  I've typeset using EC and TeXShop
> fired up Metafont to build the required bitmaps.
>
> Any idea how to configure things so that CM-Super works as one would
> expect?

This may be something introduced when fiddling with updmap.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
This is søme tèxt wïth sillÿ åccentç
\end{document}

Save in latin-1 encoding, and compile. This works for me, in a newly  
installed i-Installer TeX, which should be pretty close to MacTeX (a  
default install).

>> ImageMagick, with Freetype2, and libwmf
>> - conversion tools for a long list of bitmapped formats. Useful when
>> including formats that are not natively supported, like Tiff.
>
> Yes, but in a world where we get GraphicConverter pre-installed on our
> new Macs, who needs a command line tool for that job?  I've found out
> from elsewhere: they're there for automatic on the fly conversions,  
> and
> they are mediated by the contents of your TeX input file and  
> whether or
> not TeX is allowed to run other programs.

That is an incomplete statement.

1) It is needed for tex4ht, to create html pages from LaTeX sources,  
and tex4ht will not use Mac specific GUI tools for this.

2) calls to external packages are usually made from within packages.  
They can do quite a lot, altough the standard is to be somewhat save  
(no reading of arbitrary files higher up in the directory tree, no  
writing to files "up there"). However, if you can call perl, or any  
other scripting langage, all safety is gone. That is the reason I  
want hte shell escape disabled, I'm perfectly capable of supplying  
images in the right format, to prevent "tex macro viruses" (AFAIK,  
none have been spotted). As a convenience, however, many prefer to  
have this on the fly conversion enabled.
Choose what you want, but removing --shell-escape from the  
preferences, will stop this behaviour with an error. If I encounter  
such an error, I can decide what to do at that moment.

Maarten
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