From: peterw@archsci.arch.su.edu.au (Peter Williams ) Subject: Re: TeX & doc only work for Root Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 23:54:28 GMT
In article 10598@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU, cwilson@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Christopher S. Wilson) writes:
>In article <1993Feb19.084023.15817@unibi.hrz.uni-bielefeld.de> upsyf108@unibi.hrz.uni-bielefeld.de (Wolfgang Thiel) writes:
>>Pekka Janhunen <Pekka.Janhunen@fmi.fi> writes:
>>
>>>hi linuxers,
>>
>>>If I run xdvi, dvips or doc as root, everything works just fine. When I
>>>try
>>>as non-root, xdvi and dvips work in principle, but they try to call
>>>Metafont
>>>to generate some missing fonts every time. It takes about half a minute
>>>during
>>>which the screen is filled with Metafont messages, after which the new
>>>window
>>>correctly appears. The new font data never get installed because of
>>>permission restrictions.
>>
>>There are a few files , I think it was under /usr/TeX/lib/mf/macros,
>>that are owned bei root.system and have only rw------- permissions.
>>A chmod a+r solved the problem here.
>> Wolfgang
>
>With the standard MakeTeXPK script, you also need to have the
>directory where the .pk files live world writable. Under the SLS
>distribution, this is /usr/TeX/lib/tex/fonts.
>
>This is a security hole, though -- anyone could wipe out all the TeX
>files or use that directory for other things. Even with legitimate
>use of this directory, the amount of disk space used could get out of
>control if people are printing out various magnifications of odd fonts
>and once a font bitmap is generated, in never goes away.
>
>An alternative would be to just have MakeTeXPK put the newly generated
>fonts in a subdirectory of the user's home directory. With the
>standard MakeTeXPK, just change the line
>
> DESTDIR=$LOCALDIR/fonts
>
>to read
>
> DESTDIR=$HOME/fonts
>
>Caution: Make sure you change both MakeTeXPK files! SLS includes one
>in /usr/TeX/bin and an identical copy in /usr/TeX/lib/tex (does that
>second one ever really get used?).
>
>Now MakeTeXPK, which is used by both xdvi and dvips (and any other
>well behaved dvi driver) will put the fonts in the right place and
>even create the directory if it doesn't exist. Then all you have to
>do is tell the dvi driver to look here for fonts. For this you'll
>have to set TEXFONTS=$HOME/fonts:/usr/TeX/lib/tex/fonts and remember
>to export TEXFONTS. Do this in /etc/profile for all users to get the
>effect. Then there don't have to be any world writable files or
>directories under /usr/TeX.
>
>As long as you have all the commonly used fonts at the common sizes in
>/usr/TeX/lib/tex/fonts, this should work quite well. You might want
>to copy the contents of ~/fonts into the standard place every once in
>a while for various users if they have generated fonts that are likely
>to be used by others.
>
>I set up my system this way and it seems to work well enough for xdvi,
>but for some reason dvips seemed to ignore the TEXFONTS variable when
>I tried it. Theoretically, dvips and xdvi are supposed to use the
>same standard algorithm for finding fonts, so this difference
>shouldn't exist -- I'm going to recompile dvips from source and see
>why this doesn't work (of course, if anyone happens to know what's
>going on, I'd welcome suggestions).
>
> --Chris
A minor variation this is to put a subdirectory in the fonts directory that is
world writeable and have MakeTeXPK dump the pk files that it produces there.
This should avoid duplication of pk files that are common to users. The advice about
moving files to the fonts directory holds for this scheme.