Re: Manual PDF and translation (modular texlive?)

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

> Currently it is not easy to produce the PDF of the manual.  For
> reference, see [1].  There are 2 issues:
>
>  a) the ’texlive’ package.
>  b) the fonts about Russian or Chinese.
>
> About the a), it is really painful to download the *big* texlive package
> to be able to compile TeX.  Especially when we have modular texlive
> packages.  However, it is not clear to me which packages I have to use.
> Any help is welcome. :-)

I tried this:

    guix environment --pure guix --ad-hoc -e '(begin (use-modules (gnu packages tex))(texlive-union (list texlive-epsf texlive-fonts-ec texlive-amsfonts)))'

This allows me to build doc/guix.pdf, but it chokes on the French and
German versions (at least).  Frustratingly, texi2dvi swallows all errors
and just prints:

    pdftex exited with bad status, quitting.

Thanks, I guess.

So I ran this in strace to see what pdftex actually complained about,
and of course it’s mangled accented characters that it cannot find in
the generated fonts.  Here’s an excerpt:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
31695 read(3, "333)x433.62, glue set 4.13036\n.@glue(@leftskip) 86.72375\n.@texttt \"\n.@texttt /\n.@texttt d\n.@texttt e\n.etc.\n\n[177] l.12161: Undefined cross reference `Syst^^c3^^a8mes de fichiers-snt'. l.12161: Undefined cross reference `Syst^^c3^^a8mes de fichiers-snt'. l.12161: Undefined cross reference `Syst^^c3^^a8mes de fichiers-pg'.\nMissing character: There is no ^^c3 in font cmr10!\nMissing character: There is no ^^a9 in font cmr10!\n l.12193: Undefined cross reference `Pr^^c3^^a9parer l'installation-snt'. l.12193: Undefined cross reference `Pr^^c3^^a9parer l'installation-snt'. l.12193: Undefined cross reference `Pr^^c3^^a9parer l'installation-pg'. l.12206: Undefined cross reference `Syst^^c3^^a8mes de fichiers-snt'. l.12206: Undefined cross reference `Syst^^c3^^a8mes de fichiers-snt'. l.12206: Undefined cross reference `Syst^^c3^^a8mes de fichiers-pg'. [178]\nOverfull \\hbox (32.18782pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 12228--12228\n []                          @texttt \"video\"   ;p^^Seriph^^Seriques r^^Seseaux comme les webc"..., 98304) = 86500
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I’m very bad at fixing TeX font problems and encoding problems.  You can
tell by looking at the generated output when using texlive-union,
because it seems to be generating fonts anew even though we should
already have them all.

Any help with the TeX Live stuff would be appreciated!  It really needs
some love, and I can no longer give it; we have drifted apart.

I know of some unfixed problems that just need work (essentially just
looking at the generated files in the “texlive-{font,latex,tex,generic}-*”
packages and ensuring that they contain all files they should according
to texlive.tlpdb), but then there are also some issues that I don’t
understand enough to fix.

I’ll be glad to assist any one who would like to lead the effort to fix
our modular TeX Live packages once (or twice) and for all.

-- 
Ricardo