[OS X TeX] Font management with MacTeX 2013

[Herbert Schulz]

On Jun 22, 2013, at 2:12 PM, Murray Eisenberg <murrayeisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:

> When upgrading to a new TeXLive, why is it necessary to run manually any command for causing TeX to recognize fonts in ~/Library/texmf -- provided, of course, that one already has the appropriate updmap.cfg in ~/Library/web2c and in the TeXLive Utility sets the "Automatically enable fonts in my home directory".
> 
> Unless I am mistaken, as soon as I installed TeXLive 2013, with TeXLive 2012 previously installed, I was able to process source files using fonts from my home directory, including lucida and mtpro2.
> 
> (Or was I OK merely because I may have first run the TeXLive Utility, which with that preference set automatically ran updmap for me?)

Howdy,

More than likely it was the running of TeX Live Utility.

Running updmap creates a system-wide map (i.e., it contains all the information for ALL TeX map files, not just the personal fonts in your ~/Library/texmf tree). That's because it's only the first map file the system finds that gets read and a personal tree is found before the one directly in the TeX distribution. Since the TeX Live distribution may have different fonts distributed with it each year that system-wide map file needs to be set up for each year's distribution. For your information, that file is stored in a special tree that is created when TeX runs at ~/Library/texlive/201x/texmf-var (201x = 2013 for TeX Live 2013).

In fact, the best possible world would be one that completely isolates the information for fonts in ~/Library/texmf and the distribution font information. That would mean that TeX Live Utility wouldn't have to re-run `updmap` what fonts change in the main distribution! Unfortunately that would also mean that many heavily used programs (e.g., dvips) would have to be completely rewritten to read more than one map file and that is a daunting task. So we live with what we have.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)