I've finally gotten around to learning some TeX and I'm having a terrible time with fonts:
First I looked at the Gentle Guide's list of 'normally available' fonts and grabbed the biggest Roman I could find, only to be told "! Font \sf=CMR17 not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found." Let's see... `pinfo tex`. That's astoundlingly non-helpful. It tells what TeX does in general terms, but says nothing at all about what symbols TeX recognizes or how it's configured. OK, `man tex`... That's a little more useful, but not much. Find texfonts.map, grab a random font out of one of the files it includes... No TFM for that either. Well, then. `find / -name *.tfm`. Try /usr/share/texmf/fonts/tfm/monotype/helvetic/arr10u.tfm. tex runs fine... But wait - what's this? Now dvips dies with "dvips: Font arr10u not found, using cmr10 instead." This error message may have given me the thought to try cmr17 instead of CMR17, which does work (although it looks almost as bad as cmr10), but it still doesn't provide any hints towards finding out what fonts are available (and usable) on my system. Where is that information? -- With the arrest of Dimitry Sklyarov it has become apparent that it is not safe for non US software engineers to visit the United States. - Alan Cox "To prevent unauthorized reading..." - Adobe eBook reader license
