[SOLVED] Fedora 18 woes: latex

[Dinesh Sharma]

I had been using fedora 14 for a long time as I disliked Gnome-3 intensely. On advice from the forum members, I have installed fedora 18 with xfce. xfce is tolerable, but all hell has broken due to fedora 18!

To avoid mixing issues, I shall seek advice on one problem at a time.

I have installed texlive, texlive-latex and texlive-beamer. However, the system refuses to process my tex files as various style files (like floatflt and IEEE) are missing and kpathsee complains about missing files for font generation. For example

kpathsea: Running mktexmf phvr7t
! I can't find file `phvr7t'.
<*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input phvr7t

Please type another input file name
! Emergency stop.
<*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input phvr7t

Transcript written on mfput.log.
grep: phvr7t.log: No such file or directory
mktextfm: `mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input phvr7t' failed to make phvr7t.tfm.
kpathsekpathsea: Running mktexmf phvr7t
! I can't find file `phvr7t'.

"yum provides phvr7t" produces no results.

Has anyone succeeded in using beamer with fedora-18?

[hmaarrfk]

Seems like it is a helvetica font

you should be able to get it with
yum install texlive-helvetic

See:
http://pkgs.org/fedora-18/fedora-upd...oarch.rpm.html

[bepaald]

Also, just for future reference, to match filenames in 'yum provides', use wildcards and directory delimiters. Otherwise it will just match package names I think.

$ yum provides "/*phvr7t*"

shows many available packages that provide this font.

Yum used to issue a warning when you didn't use wildcards, but apparently it stopped doing this. The warning on my F14 box looks like this:

$ yum provides phvr7t
Warning: 3.0.x versions of yum would erroneously match against filenames.
 You can use "*/phvr7t" and/or "*bin/phvr7t" to get that behaviour
No Matches found

[Dinesh Sharma]

Dear hmaarrfk
Thanks for this information. I installed texlive-helvetic and re-processed the tex file, only to run into other fonts found missing. Using information provided by bepaald, I have painfully tracked down each package and installed them. I can convert some tex files to pdf now, but may be hit by similar problems when processing other files.
Thank you so much for your help.

Originally Posted by hmaarrfk

Seems like it is a helvetica font

you should be able to get it with
yum install texlive-helvetic

See:
http://pkgs.org/fedora-18/fedora-upd...oarch.rpm.html

---------- Post added at 04:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:11 PM ----------

Thanks bepaald for this information.

Originally Posted by bepaald

Also, just for future reference, to match filenames in 'yum provides', use wildcards and directory delimiters. Otherwise it will just match package names I think.

$ yum provides "/*phvr7t*"

shows many available packages that provide this font.

Yum used to issue a warning when you didn't use wildcards, but apparently it stopped doing this. The warning on my F14 box looks like this:

$ yum provides phvr7t
Warning: 3.0.x versions of yum would erroneously match against filenames.
 You can use "*/phvr7t" and/or "*bin/phvr7t" to get that behaviour
No Matches found

After installing texlive-helvetic, I ran into a series of other missing packages, which I painfully tracked one by one. Just in case it is useful to others, I had to install texlive-tex4ht, texlive-times, texlive-metapost, texlive-floatflt, texlive-koma, texlive-IEEEtran, texlive-IEEEconf and texlive-ams*.

There really should be a groupinstall for all this.

And why, (o why!) didn't I just stick with Fedora 14, with its wonderful Gnome 2!

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by Dinesh Sharma

There really should be a groupinstall for all this.

Unfortunately, TeX Live is masive, complex, and defines its own “package groups” which Fedora’s packages mirror. There are groups available as “schemes” and “collections” though – see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive:

You can alternatively install any of these schemes: texlive-scheme-basic texlive-scheme-context texlive-scheme-full texlive-scheme-gust texlive-scheme-medium texlive-scheme-minimal texlive-scheme-tetex texlive-scheme-xml or various pre-set TeX Live collections, the list is here: http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/collections

(Note that you don’t need the TeX Live 2012 repository mentioned on that page, as it seems to have been merged into the F18 repo at last.)

And why, (o why!) didn't I just stick with Fedora 14, with its wonderful Gnome 2!

MATE is in the F18 repos too (group "MATE Desktop”), and is a continuation of GNOME 2. You might prefer it to Xfce perhaps.

[hmaarrfk]

Hey, from my personal notes, I have this written down

yum install -y texmaker
yum install -y texlive-collection-latex
yum install -y texlive-collection-latexextra
yum install -y texlive-collection-science
yum install -y texlive-collection-latexrecommended
yum install -y texlive-collection-genericextra
yum install -y texlive-collection-genericrecommended
yum install -y texlive-collection-fontsrecommended
yum install -y tex-pst-optexp 
yum install -y texlive-epstopdf-bin

Although, even them I am missing IEEtran. Unfortunately, it takes about 1 hour to download and install everything there.

[Dinesh Sharma]

Thanks Gareth Jones.
I agree texlive is massive. However, the distribution should be consistent with the previous one. I did not have to do any of the "collection" bits with Fedora 14 and was quite taken by surprise when my existing files failed to be processed.

I am also trying out mate. Both these alternatives to Gnome-2 have some distance to go, before they become comfortable to use. That is, however, the subject of another thread.

Thanks all the same for your suggestions.

And thanks Hmaarrfk. I have taken down the list of texlive "collection"s you have mentioned and it will be useful the next time around. I may re-install Fedora 14, but get texlive-2012 from other sources.

Regards.

[ikarasalo]

I installed FC 18 yesterday, and have the same problem with latex as you described. A document that latexes without problems on FC14 and FC17, fails on FC18 with error message

...
This is METAFONT, Version 2.718281 (TeX Live 2013/dev)

kpathsea: Running mktexmf ptmr7t
! I can't find file `ptmr7t'.
<*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t

Please type another input file name
! Emergency stop.
<*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t

Transcript written on mfput.log.
grep: ptmr7t.log: No such file or directory
mktextfm: `mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t' failed to make ptmr7t.tfm.


Did you solve this problem ?

Some comments suggest that the problem can be worked around by installing one or more missing font packages. After trying this repeatedly the number of packages with name matching 'texlive' is now 1744, but the problem still remains.

Advice on this will thus be very much appreciated.

[Dinesh Sharma]

Please see the previous posts - particularly the ones from hmaarrfk and Gareth Jones. Several texlive "collections" need to be installed to get full functionality of tex/latex.

Your specific problem can be solved by installing the package texlive-texmf-fonts, which contains this font.

[hmaarrfk]

Installing the collections is a rather lengthy process.

If you want to avoid that, you only had to read to post #3 to get an answer.....

[ikarasalo]

Thanks for your suggestion. However, doing

yum install texlive-texmf-fonts

gives the output

updates/primary_db | 7.0 MB 00:27
updates/group_gz | 368 kB 00:01
Package texlive-texmf-fonts-2007-42.fc18.noarch is obsoleted by 2:texlive-2012-13.20130102_r28692.fc18.x86_64 :which is already installed
Nothing to do


Removing 2:texlive-2012-13.20130102_r28692.fc18.x86_64 with rpm and then doing

yum install texlive-texmf-fonts
or
yum install texlive-texmf-fonts-2007-42.fc18.noarch

again installs 2:texlive-2012-13.20130102_r28692.fc18.x86_64.

yum provides "/*ptmr7t*"

lists a number of packages, but 2:texlive-2012-13.20130102_r28692.fc18.x86_64
is NOT among them. The package 2:texlive-tex4ht-svn28089.0-13.fc18.noarch is,
however, and it is among the 1700 plus texlive packages yum has installed.



locate ptmr7t

gives

/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/tfm/adobe/times/ptmr7t.tfm
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/vf/adobe/times/ptmr7t.vf
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex4ht/ht-fonts/alias/times/ptmr7t.htf

Apparently mxtexmf did not search for the .tfm files in any of the above directories,
since my TEXFONTS variable was set as in FC14. The problem was solved simply by
changing it !