How to create a a package that can be installed by tlmgr?

Question

I want to be able to use a proprietary font on a number of Linux machines for which TeXLive is installed locally (not through the package manager). I have followed How do I use TrueType Fonts with PDFTeX using otftotfm? and have my proprietary font working with pdflatex when all the files (map, encoding, tfm, pfb, ...) are in the working directory. I then followed Manual font installation and can manually install the font. I would like to automate the final step. Normally, I would create a Linux package that would install the needed files and do the configuration steps. Since I have TeXLive installed locally, I don't feel like using the system package manager is the way to go. I would like to create a TeXLive package and use tlmgr to manage it.

The end goal is I want people to be able to do tlmgr --file myfont and then be able to use the font. Is this possible?

Answer 1

If you want to create a TeX Live package, you need to do the following steps. I assume here that you are not shipping any binaries, but only files in a the texmf hierarchy. Also assume that the package is called foo:

• prepare a TDS tree of the package, say in foo, that is, you have foo/tex, foo/fonts etc.
• write a tlpobj file in foo/tlpkg/tlpobj/foo.tlpobj that contains the following lines:

name foo
category Package
revision 1
shortdesc something reasonable about your package
relocated 1
execute addMap foo.map
longdesc some more description
longdesc if you want to add it
longdesc can be multi line
runfiles size=1
 RELOC/fonts/map/dvips/foobar.map
 RELOC/fonts/truetype/....
 ...
docfiles size=1
 RELOC/doc/fonts/foo/README
 ....
srcfiles size=1
 RELOCE/source/fonts/foo/...

where the following things are important:

• relocated 1
• the size parameter can be the actual size in 1k multiplies, but you don't need to add the correct number
• list all files in one of the section!
• if you have a map file included and want to activate it, add the execute line, possible adjusting the name of the file

After that go into foo and do tar -cJvf foo.tar.xz . to get the package, which you can install with tlmgr install --from-file foo.tar.xz.

Examples for how a tlpobj file looks like can be found by looking at the texlive.tlpdb, each stanza starting with name is one.