[OS X TeX] Font management with MacTeX 2013

[Gary L. Gray]

On Jun 20, 2013, at 2:02 AM, Michael Sharpe <msharpe at ucsd.edu> wrote:

> On Jun 19, 2013, at 6:15 PM, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
> 
>> Or... just put all the fonts in one location, e.g., .../texmf-local, and still live with one updmap.cfg file. :-)
> 
> That works very well as long as you don't use the --enable/--disable options to updmap-sys, perhaps inadvertently, which will create an updmap.cfg in texmf-config. (This happens when you install fonts with scripts like getnonfreefonts-sys, for example.) Then you have two updmap.cfg files, one trumping the other for the remainder of the current TeXLive year. That's not to say that keeping as much as you can in texmf-local doesn't have some serious advantages---it does not need to be reinstalled with every new TeXLive year. To me, having one updmap.cfg that lasts forever even when using --enable/--disable, with the proper initiation each year, is worth a lot.

Thank you for posting this Michael. Your post made me think about how I deal with font files since I am not a disciple of Herb's "hidden font and files" strategy. Here is my setup...

I keep everything I install in:

~/Library/texmf

and subdirectories therein, i.e.,

~/Library/texmf/bibtex
~/Library/texmf/doc
~/Library/texmf/dvips
~/Library/texmf/fonts
~/Library/texmf/source
~/Library/texmf/tex
~/Library/texmf/tpm
~/Library/texmf/web2c

Each time I install a new version of TeX Live, which is essentially once per year, I run a script I keep around that contains:

#!/bin/bash
updmap --nohash --nomkmap --syncwithtrees
updmap --nohash --nomkmap --enable Map mtpro2.map
updmap --nohash --nomkmap --enable Map lucida.map
updmap --nohash --nomkmap --enable Map iffonts.map
updmap --nohash --nomkmap --enable Map MinionPro.map
updmap --nohash --nomkmap --enable Map pmy.map
updmap

This gets my fonts working again as I expect.

In TeX Live Utility, I have "Automaticall enable fonts in my home directory." checked.

As far as I can tell (which may not be very far), this has worked well for about three years now (maybe a year or so longer than that). My question is, should I be doing something differently? Am I missing something essential with this strategy?

Thank you.

Gary