[Fedora TeX Live] f17: latexmk

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Sam Tygier wrote:
> no,
> yum provides *ptmr7t.vf
> points me to
>
> 1:texlive-times-svn21993-1.noarch : URW "Base 35" font pack for LaTeX
> Repo        : texlive
> Matched from:
> Filename    : /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/vf/adobe/times/ptmr7t.vf
>
> which seems to fix the problem.

One could in principle add a few more dependencies of one package on
another package where applicable, but I'm not sure which dependency
was missing here (which package required that dependency).

> if only latex error messages could be a bit simpler.

Just a short explanation (please don't take my explanation for
granted, it might be just a rough approximation and I might get some
details wrong). Those messages are totally confusing to me as well. In
your case TeX would search for "ptmr7t" font requested by whatever
package. Not sure about the exact order, but TeX would try search in
the following places:
- find a line "ptmr7t ..." (pointing to ttf or type1 or whatever other
font) in some map file inside <texmf>/fonts/map, but that map file has
to be loaded before requesting the font
- search for ptmr7t.vf (virtual font contains references to other fonts)
- try to run metafont (I think that it tries to process ptmr7t.mf)

If the first two attempts fail, TeX calls metafont and in your case it
is metafont that fails. One could configure TeX Live not to call
metafont, but then some (in most cases exotic) fonts wouldn't work.
Also, the message thrown would be just as cryptic as this one.

Mojca