[OS X TeX] Follow up on Two problems with Lucida Bright fonts on Mac Tex

[Herbert Schulz]

On Sep 25, 2007, at 8:57 AM, Chris Goedde wrote:

> On Sep 24, 2007, at 6:22 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
>>
>> Sorry if I seem negative, I am just getting a bit fed up with TeX  
>> at the moment. Fed up with having to spend so much time learning  
>> to use it and making it work, which leaves so few time for  
>> actually using it like the mere tool it is supposed to be. People  
>> start turning to TeX in order to get some task done (usually  
>> scientific writing), and far too often end up with TeX becoming an  
>> activity in itself, no longer a tool to an aim.
>
> I feel your pain, Bruno, having recently reinstalled Lucida support  
> myself. TeX's font setup is really primitive, and the (extremely  
> puzzling, from my point of view) decision by the TeXLive people to  
> omit the Lucida support files just adds to the pain for a lot of  
> people. Thanks for all your work writing instructions and helping  
> the rest of us get our fonts in shape.
>
> -- 
> Chris

Howdy,

The one nice thing is that once I set up the Lucida Bright Fonts I've  
used them almost constantly. I still think they are among the  
lovelies and most readable fonts around.

I've got to add my thanks for all the work Bruno has put into helping  
us all install fonts. With his ``help'' my transition from Gerben's  
teTeX based distribution to his TeX Live gwTeX distribution was  
fairly painless. I also made sure to put together a small shell  
script of all the commands I had to run to install the many fonts  
I've added to the system over time as well as kept a safe copy of the  
texmf.pkgs directory so I can move things to a new computer fairly  
easily. I even think moving to the MacTeX Tex Live distribution from  
gwTeX, if I ever do that, will go fairly smoothly.

While my experience with TeX is similar to Brunos I must say that the  
only other software that \emph{mostly} satisfied my needs (fairly  
simple documents, exams, letters and notes all with lots of maths)  
was FrameMaker and that only after struggling a long time to build  
style files that were acceptable to me and which also required a long  
learning curve. We also know that Adobe decided to no longer update  
the Mac version and finally decided to not update FrameMaker to OS X.  
After finding out about Gerben's teTeX based distribution of TeX and  
TeXShop (I did have a short foray into iTeXMac) it was back to TeX;  
but this time I adapted to LaTeX and learned how to adapt LaTeX to me  
too.

That's not to say I didn't try other things too. MS Word (v.X) was a  
disaster; every time I tried to create style sheets that conform to  
what I need it fought back, tooth and nail, until I gave up in  
frustration. In addition, using Mathtype was a bit ugly (I assume it  
has gotten better over time and I believe the latest version [not on  
Mac yet] is much better). I tried multiple other WPs, from freeware  
to shareware to commercial, and virtually none of them do a decent  
job of including maths, especially in-line maths.

One nice thing about going back to TeX is that my ancient documents  
from the late 1980's, from PC TeX days on DOS 6, still compile after  
I built my old formats. Take THAT Word, etc!

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)



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