KanTex was originally developed on UNIX machines (SunOS, HPUX, linux).

Raghunath Rao has succeeded in getting KanTex and MikTex . environment to work.

Ujwal Sathyam has succeeded in getting KanTex working on the Macs using "Textures". Here is a copy of his emailing detailing his travails

Well, the simplest solution is to create a new set of fonts for your DPI and printer type (as defined in your particular LaTex, setup. Mine is teTex, 600DPI and ljfour, respectively). The instructions are given in the README.INS and top of mffiles/makefile. REMEMBER to change the DPI to match your setup in this file. Do a "make all", this will create several font files similar to those present in the 600DPI directory. Now copy them to your favorite font location. The file README.INS has some instructions on setting TEX environment variables.

Too bad :(, we will entertain requests to uuencode and email (source only) version of the program. Note that we are only two people and responses will therefore be slow.

The posting is in the form of an gif (which netscape news convininently inlines for us). To save the posting, move your cursor over the kannada image and press the right mouse button; then use the "save this image as" option. Once the file is saved, use a viewer, like XV , to convert it to a .PS file and print it.

One can also use the "print" option from the main menu of the news reader and send it to a postscript printer. I have not personally tried it though.

If you are one of those using a modem... TOUGH!!. Seriously, there is a better way, as shown by the developers of jtrans . This involves two steps

1. Convert the metafont generated fonts to X windows bdf fonts. Relatively simply done using mftobdf

2. The challenging part is to write a web application (say using Java) to create HTML documents that use/typeset above fonts as done by jtrans

I have untarred KanTex, but LaTeX/xdvi complain about not finding font Kanxxx

Read the instructions in Readme.ins. The environmental variables required to let the LaTeX components know where the fonts are located are detailed here.

Quite a few of you have contacted with questions specific to the teTex distribution. teTex does not require setting any enviroment variables (touted as an advantage and I concur). What I do on my machine is

1. Copy the *.tfm fonts to $TETEX/texmf/fonts/tfm/tmp/ and the pk fonts to $TETEX/texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour. The ljfour directory will be different for you, it is so for me since my printer is a Laser Jet IV.

2. Run texconfig or texhash commands to update teTex's internal hash tables

I saw your web post, but am unable to print/save it.

Use the print sub-menu of the file menu in Netscape, if your printer is configured, you should see the web page printed. If you want to save a gif image, click the right button of your mouse and use the "save this image" menu.

dvips on my machine complains about wrong DPI, how do I correct this?

The default resolution of dvips (or dvilj etc.) is installation dependent, normally to confirm to some output device like a printer. The KanTex distribution comes with 600DPI fonts assuming a laser jet kinda printer. At home (on linux) I have KanTex installed with 300DPI fonts for a deskjet DJ600C.

The simplest solution is to create a new set of fonts with the required DPI. The details are given in README.INS and the top line of mffiles/makefile. Remember to change the DPI value at the top of the makefile. Doing a "make all" will create all the required font sizes at the desired DPI. One can also create individual fonts sizes by doing, for example, "make kan10", to create a point size 10 versopn of the fonts.

The same procedure should work on any platform including Windoze'95. Note here that "make" is not a standard windows command, but there are anonymous FTP sites that contain this command and other useful *nix utilities.

After this, either copy the files over to standard tex fonts directories or set your fontpath variables to point to the new location.

Now that I have KanTex running, how do I post to the newsgroups

The following note assumes you know how to post to a newsgroup, if not, that question is best addressed to your sysadmin. The current method Jagadeesh and I use depends upon having a graphical news browser with built-in image display capability (like netscape). Web browsers do not (as yet :) support kannada fonts, therefore, a somewhat convoluted method has to be employed. It involves the following steps

1. Convert the .dvi file to a postscript using dvips

2. Convert the .ps file to a .gif or .jpg using xv (or any other converter). I use XV since it has an option (configurable at compile time) to read postscript file (actually it invokes ghostscript to do the actual conversion).

3. Play with the image to get the color, size, resolution etc. to your satisfaction.

4. Post it to the newsgroup (with netscape, images and other file formats can be posted as "attachments").

5. Of course, to read the post, others must also use a similar graphical news reader.