Re: Manual PDF and translation (modular texlive?)

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi!
>
> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:
>
>> This patch fixes it:
>
> [...]
>
>> +                     (("translate-file=cp227")
>> +                      (format #f 
>> "translate-file=~a/share/texmf-dist/web2c/cp227"
>> +                              (assoc-ref inputs "texlive-kpathsea")))))
>
> Woow, thumbs up.  Not something one could have guessed!

Hah, when I originally added the code to build the fmt files this
problem did stick out to me, but I thought it would be solved eventually
by modifying search paths in the configuration file.

It’s odd that the file cannot be found when it is already part of the
texlive-union and the search paths include all sub-directories.  But I
don’t want to investigate further when patching gets us to the correct
output faster :)

>> There are still remaining problems when using make doc/guix.de.pdf:
>>
>> * kpathsea causes mktexpk to be run for a number of fonts that already
>>   exist in the union (e.g. ecrm1200).  Why aren’t they found?  Perhaps
>>   that’s because TeX Live only includes the font metrics (.tfm), but not
>>   the .pk files.  I wonder why the .pk files are used at all.
>>
>> * despite successfully generating the PDF file in the temporary build
>>   directory, make aborts:
>>
>>   /gnu/store/mw4llmn2l617gf5zakfk1l154f19lxbm-profile/bin/texi2dvi: pdftex 
>> exited with bad status, quitting.
>>   make: *** [Makefile:4375: doc/guix.de.pdf] Error 1
>
> ‘texi2dvi’ swallows error messages; I’m not sure it can be made more
> verbose, but I remember debugging it through strace (!) where I could
> see the underlying messages, which sometimes contain hints if you’re
> able to read between the lines.

I used strace as well before I found that the log files are kept in the
temporary build directory under doc/guix.de.t2p.  Later I found that
“make V=1 doc/guix.de.pdf” shows the TeX output, which is also helpful.
Still, it’s very noisy and it’s not clear which of the many messages
correspond to the fatal error.  Oh well.

The .pk files are bitmap fonts that are generated when T1 fonts are not
found.  Adding texlive-cm-super to the union avoids generation of bitmap
fonts for the CM fonts (which are the default when no other fonts are
found), so that solves most of the problems and allows me to remove all
of those (setenv "HOME" "/tmp") hacks in packages that use the
texlive-union.  That’s now implemented on the wip-texlive branch.

The French manual can be built in PDF format, so I’m suspecting a
problem with the German texi sources that turns fatal when building the
PDF.

-- 
Ricardo