[Info-vax] LaTeX, VMS, CM fonts, DisplayPostScript fonts, GV, GS etc

[JohnF]

In comp.text.tex Phillip Helbig---
undress to reply <helbig at astro.multiclothesvax.de> wrote:
> JohnF <john at please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes: 
> 
>> Off-topic, and simply curious, but I've read some of your other
>> LaTeX/VMS posts, and wondered why you're investing so much effort
>> trying to maintain it. 
> 
> I don't think it's that much effort; it's just that I haven't used it 
> for a while.
> 
>> I have about 15 years past VMS development
>> experience (resume's at www.forkosh.com), but my remaining contracts
>> mostly involve maintaining systems after porting them away from VMS
>> to Unix. There's still some sporadic legacy VMS maintenance work
>> from clients who couldn't/wouldn't port, but as for truly new VMS
>> development, that's (in alphabetical order) nada/nil/zero/zip,
>> as far as I can tell. 
> 
> The LaTeX stuff is for home.  At work, I'm involved in new code on VMS, 
> so perhaps I'm not as pessimistic.

Nice surprise! I'm very surprised to hear about any
new VMS code (i.e., besides a little new code to
maintain large old legacy systems).

>> And while I still edit VMS code "in situ"
>> with edt, latex documentation is prepared on a linux pc (or windows
>> if forced). Even if a current and completely functional texlive
>> distribution were available on VMS, I'd just never use it.
>> I always liked the platform, but it just doesn't seem like
>> the right place to continue working anymore.
> 
> In my case, my own stuff has grown since 1992.  Transitions through 
> several physical disks, of course, and countries, and computers, but 
> still my original environment on VMS.  Whatever effor I put into 
> maintaining it is negligible compared to the effort which would 
> require to port it elsewhere.

As far as I've ever experienced, absolutely zero effort to
port latex source to another platform containing a tex distribution
with all required packages, fonts, whatever. Porting C source,
my usual development language, is sometimes a very different
story, of course, which is why they pay me the medium bucks.

> Now that reasonably fast VMS machines are 
> available for free, I should be able to keep going for a while.

Yeah, I have a small menagerie of VMS machines (VS4K/90's, DS10's)
at home, but avoid doing legitimate (paying) work on them because
of hobbyist license restrictions (and not enough VMS-specific work 
to warrant purchasing licenses). Moreover, I can't ethically
recommend to any client still using VMS that they do anything
but migrate whenever a convenient opportunity presents itself.
Hardware maintenance contracts are all-but-unavailable,
experienced systems and development people are retiring
without replacement, etc. That's all okay for my soho office,
but impractical/unprofessional for serious business.
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j at f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )