Dear group members:


SITUATION
--------------

I have been unable to use other font beaside Roman, Concrete and DejaVu.

Recently in this list, Aleksandr Dobkin contributed a zip file with an ample collections of fonts.  I copied those fonts to my user folder (C:\Documents and Settings\Denis\Datos de programa\TeXmacs), but because it doesn't work as expected I copied to C:\SinMenu\TeXmacs\fonts, without a positive result yet.

The file my-init-texmacs.scm was copied to C:\Documents and Settings\Denis\Datos de programa\TeXmacs\progs in both tests.  I know that my-init-texmacs.scm worked because I now have a new menu item: 'FreeFonts'.

But the problems are still the same as with previous TeXmacs versions:

1)  Some fonts render unreadable characteres.
2)  Other fonts, are incapable to render spanish letters, like á é í ó ú Á É Í Ó Ú ü Ü ñ Ñ ¿ ¡
3)  Some fonts aren't aplied to the text.  I see no changes and I know the face of some of these fonts.
4)  Of the additional free fonts, only Times works.  The remaining fonts (Palatino, DejaVu Serif and Liberation Serif), aren't applied to text, even with the actions from the 'format' menu.

The only fonts that works for me now, are:  Roman, Concrete and DejaVu. With those fonts I can manage to have serif and sans serif types, but between Roman and DejaVu are a great difference of style.  I wish that at least have access to the whole DejaVu family.

Just to complete information on my environment.  I am using Windows XP SP3, spanish with a 102 keys keyboard configured to latinoamerican spanish.  I included in machine path environment variable, TeXmacs directory, incase this is of help.  I had ghostgum, gsview, MikTeX and other programs of personal interest that TeXmacs is suposed to interface, but I have not been able to use any of them from within TeXmacs, yet.  But this is other topic.

I included a file with my tests (Prueba-caracteres.tm) and an inventory of what fonts works and what does not.  I learned that this file is ansi encoded instead of  UTF-8.  Could this be a source of problems?

I included also, some configuration files: font_cache.scm, preferences.scm and settings.scm in case that this could help to identify a potencial problem.

I read that TeXmacs can use font metric files from a LaTeX installation (mine is MikTeX) to use raster fonts as needed.  But this does not happen in my installaton.  Half a year ago I saw that this happened, but now I don't understed why it does not happen.  My MikTeX installation is recent and have used it little.  It is a full actuallized instalation. Maybe, TeXmacs needs that all pk data be previosly built to get access to it.

I suspect that my problems are asociated to two situations:

1)  The character tables or encodings, probably have a glitch with spanish. If I copy from TeXmacs to Notepad (I am using a UTF-8 font, DejaVu Sans), some characters are in reality others.  For instance, the aperture interrogation sign is in Notepad the 3/4 character.  The opening admiration is 1/2.  And the opening guilemet is \S and the closing guilemet is \T. This last two cases aren't critical because I can do a search and replace in case it is needed to copy text to other windows application.

2)  Some how, the postscript fonts lacks some complementary files.  I can't identify what those file are, because the directory structure of fonts in TeXmacs is different from MikTeX.

The TeXmacs fonts manual (on Help -- Source code -- TeXmacs fonts), says:

  ----
  "At the top level, <TeXmacs> calls a macro of the form\

  <\verbatim>
    \ \ \ \ ($name $family $series $shape $size $dpi)
  </verbatim>

  as a function of the current environment in the text. In the future, the top
  level macro call might change in order to enable the user to let the font
  depend on other environment variables."
  ----

At the begining I have had a hard time understanding TeXmacs, but right now I am comfortable with it and want to learn how to use it properly, but this problem with fonts stops me to use TeXmacs in practical things.


WHAT  I  LOOK  FOR
-------------------------

I like to know about how to configure fonts for TeXmacs.

Could somebody point me to a specific manual or information, that explains how to make fonts accesible to TeXmacs and correct, if it is the case, the character table?


Many thanks in advance for any guidance in this matter and congratulations to TeXmacs team members that have made available this impressive jewel.



Denis J Navas