Unable to find files

If a program complains it cannot find fonts (or other input files), any of several things might be wrong. In any case, you may find the debugging options helpful. See section Debugging.

• Perhaps you simply haven't installed all the necessary files; the basic fonts and input files are distributed separately from the programs. See section `unixtex.ftp': Obtaining TeX.
• You have (perhaps unknowingly) told Kpathsea to use search paths that don't reflect where the files actually are. One common cause is having environment variables set from a previous installation, thus overriding what you carefully set in `texmf.cnf' (see section Supported file formats). System `/etc/profile' or other files such may be the culprit.
• Your files reside in a directory that is only pointed to via a symbolic link, in a leaf directory and is not listed in `ls-R'. Unfortunately, Kpathsea's subdirectory searching has an irremediable deficiency: If a directory d being searched for subdirectories contains plain files and symbolic links to other directories, but no true subdirectories, d will be considered a leaf directory, i.e., the symbolic links will not be followed. See section Subdirectory expansion. You can work around this problem by creating an empty dummy subdirectory in d. Then d will no longer be a leaf, and the symlinks will be followed. The directory immediately followed by the `//' in the path specification, however, is always searched for subdirectories, even if it is a leaf. Presumably you would not have asked for the directory to be searched for subdirectories if you didn't want it to be.
• If the fonts (or whatever) don't already exist, MakeTeXPK (or MakeTeXMF or MakeTeXTFM) will try to create them. If these rather complicated shell scripts fail, you'll eventually get an error message saying something like `Can't find font fontname'. The best solution is to fix (or at least report) the bug in MakeTeXPK; the workaround is to generate the necessary fonts by hand with Metafont, or to grab them from a CTAN site (see section `unixtex.ftp': Obtaining TeX).
• There is a bug in the library. See section Reporting bugs.

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