I thought I ask here since folks here are experts on fonts. I am running Maple to generate .ps images to include in my Latex. I get an error from Maple saying "cannot locate postscript AFM files". Googling around these are old adobe font files it seems. But I have no idea why Maple can't find them and where they can be. I am on windows 10. Any one knows anything about these .AFM files and where to find them on windows by anychance?

I will also ask at the Maple forum, but I doubt anyone there will help or know about these files but will try.

does TeXLive come with these font files? If so may be I can copy them from texlive folder and move them somewhere where Maple can find them?

@Nasser Yes, you see a lot of afm files in your texlive: One example: texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/lm/lmr10.afm.

@Nasser they are font metrics and could be anywhere. tex related afm are in texmf-dist/fonts/afm/ but for a font you are using in maple, it may be with the font, or you may not have it at all

@DavidCarlisle Ok, I see them. But can one just copy these to windows from Linux or are these binary for Linux? And if so, where to put them on windows so Maple can see them? I know nothing about fonts. I think this is a problem with Maple itself. They must have forgotten to ship Maple with all the fonts it needs? This only happens when I try to export a plot to postscript file using Maple command line.

I read that on windows, all fonts go to C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\ folder. But I can't just copy these over, windows will not let me do that. The folder is write protected it seems.

@Nasser afm are ascii files

@Nasser I doubt very much that maple will look into windows/fonts for afm files.

@Nasser if you are using luatex why make postscript ?

@DavidCarlisle This is limitation of Maple. unfortunately it has no way to export to PDF programmatically. So my program which runs and generates plot, it need to export it, and ps is the only option they have. In the GUI one can export a plot to pdf using GUI menu, but from code, it is not possible. It is hard to believe this in the year 2023, but this is how it is. So I export to ps and then convert the files to pdf later.

I complained about this to Maple over the years, but they really either do not care or do not have the resources to add export to PDF from code.

@DavidCarlisle here is list of the formats one can export to a file in Maple (not using GUI). You see, there is no PDF. jpg, gif, and ps etc.. but no PDF.

Quick question: In this post the user has edited his question based on my answer (in a way that my answer now doesn't make sense anymore) and asking for a more specific version of the same problem. As the problem is still basically the same (well, now it is “why does my arara rule not work” instead of “why doesn't arara find my rule”), I don't know whether it's a good idea to roll back and ask to create a new question or not.

@TeXnician I normally complain if this happens and ask the OP to ask a new question if they have a new question.

@UlrikeFischer Okay, will do, thanks.

@TeXnician you don't have to do it like me ;-) That is my choice how to handle that not a general rule ...

@UlrikeFischer Well, this was also my gut feeling how to handle it, so I'm inclined to do that as well. I just wanted some kind of confirmation that others do things similarly ;)

@TeXnician imho it is confusing if questions suddenly change, and it is unfair to the helper to ask them to adjust a valid answer.

@UlrikeFischer Agreed. Especially if helpers don't get notified that their answers are suddenly invalidated (I stumbled upon the question update by chance). I left a comment. Let's see what happens.

@TeXnician Such a shameless waste of other people's time.

@barbarabeeton I removed all my comments in Remove space before colorbox. Again I'm sorry for the disturbance. I saw that this problem of unwanted comment apears actually 4 times today... I supose it appends during the process of flaging a question, maybe I press a non desired key or it appends when I leave the page in order to get the url of the question I want to be the duplicate "target". I don't know but it is very enoying.

@barbarabeeton Also I'm sorry if I was wrong in flaging this question as duplicate. Obviously that was beyond my skills. I will try to be more vigilant in the future.

@SylvainRigal -- Oh, that happens to me too. Before I hit the final button to accept a vote for deletion I try to remember to rethink my decision, and if I decide it's not warranted, I look for the X to cancel it.

@barbarabeeton Ok I'll be more vigilent about this... Thanks !

Upon reading tex.stackexchange.com/questions/510/…, I got surprised that it's possible to write an anonymous comment. Or is it AI-generated, along with the downvote?

@AlMa0 Neither options. The Community user just has a limited selection of texts which are basically the flagging options/deletion review texts. And the downvote is most likely the automated one which appears when someone flags an answer as “low quality”.

@TeXnician Alright, thx.

Subjectively, I find tex.stackexchange.com/a/656940 worse because it doesn't provide us with an example. But I thought we don't downvote. Or has anything changed and I should start downvoting and be prepared for at least the community bot to downvote me?

@AlMa0 As I said, it is most likely that the user who flagged did a “low quality” flag and that automatically issues a downvote. Most users on this SX site still do note vote down intentionally.

@TeXnician O.k.

@AlMa0 And yes, the answer you link to is worse but that does not mean that your answer is good. I did not flag but I can understand that there may be people who do not think that a personal preference, especially when it comes to highlighting in a certain editor which is covered by another answer already, warrants another answer. And your speculation about making less errors doesn't substantially improve it either.

NB: This answer also already hints at the highlighting fact although staying vague on the actual editors that have an easier time with pair matching.

@TeXnician Tool support put aside, personal experiences is as best as we can get. To get an objective measure, we'd need to conduct a randomized controlled test: half of the participants should use $…$, another half should use \(…\), and they have to typeset the same texts, and at the end we'd measure their overall error rate and their overall performance. I don't see such a test happening even for more important tasks.

@AlMa0 Yes, sure, but nobody mentioned that you have to answer with the slippery slope of personal preferences (as you phrase your answer, I would not necessarily call it experience, more like preference and speculation). The other answers that got upvotes try to mention at least some technical backgrounds, albeit sometimes very short. In the end this is a community site. Someone from the community flagged, others will determine if they concur or view your answer as quality content.

And concerning your highlighting example: I do actually agree that highlighting in emacs is a strong use case for \(…\). In my case, the problem with $ are mostly listings with unmatched dollar signs which can cause half of the document being marked up as math because the $ matching in emacs is just bad (don't remember if it's actually auctex's $ matching). So I really do get your use case and why you consider highlighting an important factor in the decision.

I understand. Another example of similar questions is: “which editorial system is best for typesetting simple letters: Winword, Libreoffice, emacs+latex, or vi+latex?” Given the absence of scientific-quality tests, we can still speak about tool support and (here, too) highlighting, but the perceived performance and error rate remains a speculation. So yes, unfortunately, a speculation is sometimes as good as it gets and you're right in using this word.

In order to make it a non-speculation, we'd have to create a copy of ourselves that does exactly the same as we do but for one single decision. Then, we'd have to compare our results with the results of our copies :-).

@TeXnician Does “Most users on this SX site still do note vote down intentionally.” mean that most users may or may not vote down, but if they do so, it happens unintentionally? Or does “Most users on this SX site still do note vote down intentionally.” mean that most users intentionally distance themselves from voting down?

@AlMa0 The latter. And it's of course a subjective perception. I still think that the general attitude towards downvoting on this site is rather cautious. Of course, some people vote down and they will do it intentionally. But I was intending to say that quite a number of downvotes will happen “unintentionally” by them flagging a question/answer for review through others (and SE's automated downvotes associated with some flags).

@TeXnician Alright. Then I (being a non-bot, though you'd have to believe me on this :-) ) continue keeping the no-downvotes policy myself. Nowadays folks have to believe each other on being non-bots. This was unimaginable a decade ago.