jlatex, dvips, fonts...

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "B0Ti" == B0Ti  <9915104t@example.com> writes:

    B0Ti> Again, I spent a whole afternoon trying to get japanese
    B0Ti> working with tex, dvips, etc.

Works fine for me; on Debian unstable I just installed all the tetex
packages, ptex-base, ptex-bin, platex, dvipsk-ja, xdvik-ja, and
possibly some fonts/tfms.  Didn't do anything special, just let
dselect have its head.

    B0Ti> [boti@example.com textest]$ dvi2ps -d ja_test.dvi

dvi2ps is dangerous, last I looked it didn't use kpathsea.  The errors
certainly suggest that.

    B0Ti> I have the dmjkf10 font in TFM format:

erm, TFM = TeX font metric.  That just tells you how big the box is,
it doesn't actually put any ink in it.

    B0Ti> /usr/share/texmf/fonts/tfm/mling/nttsub/dmjkf10.tfm

Looks like an NTT font; I don't know if ASCII ptex knows about those
if you don't install the ptex-jtex shim.

    B0Ti> xdvi-ja gives a segfault, I assume it's font problems too
    B0Ti> (and a badly written program).

Yeah, right.  I don't _think_ so.  I rather doubt it's crashing
anywhere near the xdvi code.  The Japanese patches are probably a
crock[1], and the X libraries have always sucked badly.  It's _hard_ to
write programs that never SIGSEGV under most X libraries.  XFree86 has
never _been_ an exception[2], it just _throws_ one randomly every now
and then.


Footnotes: 
[1]  This is usually the case with patches that never get integrated
into the mainline.  Not necessarily the "fault" of the patcher; it's
very hard to maintain such things and they grow hair over the years.

[2]  That's how I became an XEmacs developer: chasing down a crock in
the XIM code.

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