Bug#65837: installing local .mf files

[Dan Christensen <jdc@jhu.edu>]

Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk> writes:
> So package them ;-)

Well, I don't use either lamstex or pb-diagram, so I'm not really the
right person to package them.  But I do want to be able to view dvi
files produced by these packages, and for that all that is needed
is the five .mf files.  They would be a trivial addition to one
of the tetex packages that would help people reading math papers.
If you think those five files would be worth their own package, I
guess I could do that, but it seems like unnecessary overhead.

> > One catch:  there are already files named lams1.mf through lams5.mf in
> > 
> >   /var/spool/texmf/source/lh/lh-t2a/
> 
> Yes, they come from an old version of mktexmf which though lams* were
> Cyrillic (?) characters.  That's now fixed, so you can safely delete
> these files.

Just out of curiosity, how did .mf files end up in /var/spool?  Seems
like stuff mf produces rather than input files should end up there.
Maybe the documentation that explains how to add local fonts could
include a paragraph giving an overview of how TeX fonts are
arranged/generated/etc in a Debian system.  (I recall that when I
installed tetex on a Solaris machine a couple of years ago there were
many tricky decisions to be made to balance security against having
automatically generated fonts available to all users.)

Thanks,

Dan