Dear ConTeXters, I'm a newcomer to ConTeXt and to this congenial and obviously active list: please bear with me and read my story. I'll be much more succinct in future. Last week, I installed TeTex and ConTeXt [Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther"]. I'm working my way through the "Excursion" and "This Way/ My Way" documents. They are great documents, ConTeXt is a great package, and I've had some timely tips from Hans Hagen (Hail thee, Hans!). I've made some good progress. I have learned the difference between a _Hasselter juffer_ and a _Hasselter bitter_, but I'm still not sure what one does with a _foekepot_. I suspect that it's a percussion instrument, but that's beside the point. I have a history of user-level LaTeX formatting in my distant past. I've mostly been stuck in the dark, ragged, dreary, world of MS Office for the past decade, so you can understand my joy to see beautiful, colourful .pdf pages rolling up my screen, as a result of typing straightforward, comprehensible formatting commands in a plain text ascii file. As my fellow Australians would say: ** You little ripper! ** Now, I've managed to side-step some menacing signs of absent fonts as I progressed. My goals are straightforward (technical documentation and scientific writing), so I've been happy to accept the font fallback/replacement routines. Further, my glimpses into the pages and pages of information about font handling make me think that it's a kind of bad neighbourhood for a person like me to enter, just as it was when TeX and I were young. But now I've struck the following blockade in my quest to produce a 'My Way' document, which I did by simply 1) cutting and pasting the source code from the page 3 of My Way #0 [mag-0000.pdf] 2) changing the author name, and 3) saving the resultant text as [mwy-000-Test.tex], then 4) running the perl "texexec" script on it. OK, don't snicker, it may not be such a silly thing to try. I'm sure there are other people who might try this kind of approach. Here is the gist of the result -- ellipses mark my deletions. ------------------------------START--------------------------- [nvri-hayden:~/Documents/ConTEXt/MyWay] paulm% texexec --color --pdf mwy-000-Test TeXExec 5.2.4 - ConTeXt / PRAGMA ADE 1997-2005 ... system : macros of module mag-01 loaded ... (/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/context/base/type- akb.tex)kpathsea: Running mktextfm uplr8t mktextfm: Running mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input uplr8t This is METAFONT, Version 2.71828 (Web2C 7.5.3) kpathsea: Running mktexmf uplr8t ! I can't find file `uplr8t'. <*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input uplr8t Please type another input file name ! Emergency stop. <*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input uplr8t Transcript written on mfput.log. grep: uplr8t.log: No such file or directory mktextfm: `mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input uplr8t' failed to make uplr8t.tfm. kpathsea: Appending font creation commands to missfont.log. ... ! Font \*palatino12ptrmtf*:=uplr8t at 12.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file no t found. ... ---------------------------------------------FINISH------------------- [etc etc, I think that 'nonstopmode' might have been why this loop continued for the next 120 seconds. BTW I typed 'Q' in response to the input file name request above]. Now, it's obvious from the ContextGarden that I've probably missed some step in font configuration. But when I start to look in the numerous sources of advice, I strike the usual frustration. There are lots of statements (lots and lots of 'em!) about checking and un-commenting and configuring, but I can find no list of *prioritised* things for beginners to try, in the order which they should be tried, in order to solve what looks to be a simple and typical problem. Without such a set of instructions, I'm loath to change anything in my configuration, for fear that the cure might be worse than the disease. I'd love to try to understand the source of the error, and how to handle fonts professionally, and lots of other things as well. But I'm a busy scientist with many other commitments. As long as ConText is working I'm happy, but I can't devote much time to delving into errors. So I may not be a typical participant in this list. But if you help me, you will help to make ConTeXt more accessible to others like me, and this will be good for the cause, _nes pas?_ I'd be happy to write a my way document or contribute a Wiki page on this topic to encapsulate any good advice for myself and other neophytes. Yours, P. Paul R Martin National Vision Research Institute of Australia Tel: +613 9349 7481 prmartin@unimelb.edu.au