2011-09-21 Finally managed to use the Linux Libertine OpenType font with Heirloom troff. There were two problems, as I now understand: First, the font files from the distribution tarball had 640 per- missions, instead of 644. When I copied them as root, they became unreadable for my normal user account. Second, the `TROFFONTS' environment variable specifies a directory which contains the font files directly, whereas the `-F' command line switch speci- fies a directory which contains device subdirectories which con- tain the font files. These two problems in combination resulted two days of failing. Again, I learned that you should defer a problem if it appears to be very strange. On another day, you likely see the reason clearly. Now I can use custom OpenType fonts, which provide beautiful old-style numerals and true small caps. :-) `psbook' and `psnup' work well, much better as my experiences from earlier days were. Probably this had been related to embed- ding of fonts. Seems these times are gone, fortunately. There used to be `ps2pdf' and `pstopdf', the latter one including fonts, the former one not. I wonder where `pstopdf' has gone, but it doesn't matter because the other one now includes fonts, too, automatically. Up to now, I used the ms macro package for troff. For my master's thesis I thought about using mm, which are said to be more power- ful. After some testing I came to the conclusion that mm are too restrictive for me. Hence I returned to ms. Naturally I had some special wishes. Thus I enhanced the macros by wrappers, append- ings and by modifying internal registers. All these actions didn't modify the macro package file itself, but effected it after it is processed. By touching the internals of the macro package I became dependent on this specific implementation. Caused by this fact and the wish to modify more directly I think about modifying a copy of the ms macros and distribute that one -- my own macro package. ``The UNIX Text Processing'' book in- cludes chapters on this topic. I should read them first in order to learn about experiences and advice. All in all, I'm doing well on the troff track. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke