m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Metafont

I’ve been learning Metafont from Christophe Grandsire’s Metafont Tutorial, in order to make a font for my conscript. It was going pretty well, except that I couldn’t display the dvi proofs; I had to convert them all to PDFs instead.

Tonight I found a clue in the MacOSX-TeX mailing list archives and came up with a final solution to metafont problems:

  1. Run X11.
  2. Set the Terminal display to :0.0 thus:
    • tcsh (pre-Panther) users type setenv DISPLAY :0.0 or add that line to your .tcshrc file
    • bash users type export DISPLAY=:0.0 or add that line to your .bash_profile file

Proofs should now open up automatically in xdvi under X11.