Thank you, Thomas, for your answer to my question on X support.
I can now see what I do, but the road was an arduous one and I fear that
I may have missed some easier solutions on the way. I think there may
be a bug in the file gray.mf, but for completeness here is the full story.
I'm following instructions in "The METAFONTbook", chapter 5.
The first time I ran mfw and typed 'showit', a huge window
(logical size approximately 1500x2000, anyway much larger than
my 1280x1024 screen) came up, but nothing was visible on it.
Neither could I succeed in xdvi'ing mfput.dvi after running
gftodvi on mfput.2602gf: it couldn't find the font and
substituted cmr10 instead (not pretty). This was the output:
$ xdvi mfput
kpathsea: Running mktexpk --mfmode ljfour --bdpi 600 --mag 1+0/600 --dpi 600 gra
y
mktexpk: Running mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1+0/600; nonstopmode; input gray
This is METAFONT, Version 2.7182 (Web2C 7.3.1)
(/usr/share/texmf/fonts/source/public/misc/gray.mf
(/usr/share/texmf/fonts/source/public/misc/graycx.mf
! This file is for cx only.
<to be read again>
;
l.4 ...>cx: errmessage "This file is for cx only";
fi
(/usr/share/texmf/fonts/source/public/misc/grayf.mf [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]
[5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20]
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[66] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] [77] [78] [79] [80]
[81] [82] [83] [84] [85] [86] [87] [88] [89] [90] [91] [92] [93] [94] [95]
[96] [97] [98] [99] [100] [101] [102] [103] [104] [105] [106] [107] [108]
[109] [110] [111] [112] [113] [114] [115] [116] [117] [118] [119] [120]
[121] [122] ) ) )
(see the transcript file for additional information)
Font metrics written on gray.tfm.
Output written on gray.600gf (123 characters, 13296 bytes).
Transcript written on gray.log.
mktexpk: `mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1+0/600; nonstopmode; input gray' failed.
kpathsea: Appending font creation commands to missfont.log.
xdvi.bin: can't find font gray; using cmr10 instead at 600 dpi.
The file gray.600gf is deleted automatically and only gray.log remains.
After several other attempts (trying dvips; adding "mfmode" options to
the xdvi line) I thought of:
$ mf gray
The same error message appeared, but this time gray.2602gf was not
deleted, and I could successfully:
$ gftopk gray.2602gf
after which
$ xdvi -mfmode proof:2602 mfput
finally allowed me to see the results, although there was a warning:
Checksum mismatch (dvi = 436373507, pk = 312461142) in font file ./gray.2602pk
Encouraged by this success, I tried 'mfw' again, and this time round the
picture did display successfully under 'showit'. The window seems not
to be a normal X window that can redraw itself after being resized,
hidden etc, one has to reissue 'showit' each time.
However, all this only works in this one directory where gray2602.pk
resides.
What I think happens:
1. 'showit' under 'mfw' in proof mode depends on the existence of
the file gray2602.pk.
2. The file 'gray.mf' mistakenly is tied to just one mode instead
of being mode independent. In fact, apart from issuing the error
message, there seems to be nothing in the file 'graycx.mf' that
does not work for other modes too.
Dirk
PS I have similar problems with \mode=smoke, but I expect the solution
will also be similar.
