i took the following approach to troubleshooting the situation.
Instead of running the command
./koch pdf
or
pdflatex doc/manual.tex
i tried the following steps
cd doc
latex manual.tex
dvips manual.dvi
ps2pdf manual.pdf
as the interim command of dvips executed it highlighted some issues with the
font. The rendered postscript file when viewed, displayed some of the content
of the page. This meant the missing fonts were not embedded/rendered in the
document.
at this point in time, the question raised was, "is there a problem with the
latex fonts installed on arch linux" ?
