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Metafont and X: the solution



Dear Nils,
and all you other attentive followers of this thread:

I finally got the solution to the MF + X problem. 

I was already recompiling the sources, but the strange thing was that
"--with-x" actually does appear in debian/rules. So I took a close look
at the configure files, and there I found the option
"--with-mfw", undocumented in the Web2C manual. mfw, I guessed, is mf
with window support...

	/home/stefan> locate mfw
	/usr/bin/mfw
	/usr/man/man1/mfw.1.gz
	/usr/src/linux/net/ipv4/ip_masq_mfw.c
	/home/stefan>

The man page is the Debian dummy man page. The only problem is that mfw
standardly expects a mfw.base base file, which does not exist. So what you
do is: use whichever window manager and terminal emulator you want; have
your TERM variable set to what you like (in my case "rxvt"); _but_ set
MFTERM to "xterm"; and finally, when running mfw explicitly demand 
"mf.base" as the base file:

	mfw -base mf

Voila, la fenetre. If you want a reasonably sized window, set the
X resource "Metafont.geometry". And that's it.

The one thing I do consider a bug is that mf.base is not symlinked to
"mfw.base" (as it is symlinked to "plain.base"). And a mention of mfw in
/usr/doc/tetex-bin/README.debian would be nice; /usr/man/man1/mfw.1.gz
could then point to the mf man page, with maybe the addition of "mfw" in
the NAME section, maybe even one or two sentences in the ONLINE GRAPHICS
OUTPUT section pointing the reader to mfw (but then, I don't know if
changing the upstream manpage for what is essentially a compile time
option is good).

I haven�t filed a bug yet; instead I'm sending a copy to the maintainer
(hi Christoph) and see what happens next.

Have a nice day,
Stefan

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