Taming Distiller

I happen to use a Mac. This makes me pretty comfortable with viewing and creating PDF files. My favourite typesetting program, lout, can also output PDF, but it is rather limited, especially when it comes to graphics. This is why I normally go the longer (but recommended) route via PostScript files.

Today lout v3.36 arrived, and I gave it a try:
Building on Solaris was a breeze, as always. Thirsting for a challenge, I downloaded some Latin Modern fonts (refined versions of Knuth's original Computer Modern fonts) and tried to get them running under lout.

It was not easy.

Not being a font expert, first I was overwhelmed by the .afm .pfb files from the CTAN site. I did not know where to put them, so that I simply dropped them beside my .lout file. It did not work, of course. I had to pass "-F ." to lout to find them. (Lout is only interested in .afm, font metrics, files.)
I also had to prepare a @FontDef database, but there were enough examples in the web.
After a lot of googling I figured out the PSRESOURCEPATH environment variable. It must have this format: "path1:path2::" and is used for searching diverse PostScript resources. Using it, I could stash my fonts away in a different location.

There is a handy utility I stumbled upon, makepsres, which built up the font inventory inside my newly created /home/ggreif/psres folder. I desisted to fill in the mandatory PSres.upr file inside it after three trials in vain.

So, lout was happy with lm.ld and "-F /home/ggreif/psres" and produced a pretty .ps for me.
Distiller, on the other hand followed PSRESOURCEPATH and PSres.upr, converting the .ps into a .pdf. So far, so good. (There was still this pesky "unsetenv XUSERFILESEARCHPATH" to do, but I shall spare the details.)

After understanding the Solaris workflow, I had some hope to successfully repeat this experiment on my Mac too. But that is a story for another day...