CJK font fun

Now I remember why I hate doing this so much. Every time I try to install Asian fonts for TeX, something doesn't work the way that it worked the last time I did it. Installing the CJK package works well enough, and is quite straightforward, but it tends to expect fonts that are nowhere to be seen on CTAN. At the least, the CTAN:/fonts/CJK directory never gets updated.

I've even lost track now of where I got the TrueType Chinese fonts that I already had, but they're apparently no longer the right ones. I've now finally located the Arphic fonts, which appear to be what everyone wants to use, via a lot of Googling on the fonts that the CJK TeX documentation source required. There are no mention of these fonts at all in the documentation proper, just in the TeX source code for it.

I've already decided to give up on Thai support for right now, since the pointer in the CJK documentation is to a resource that flatly doesn't exist. I found the SRPM (ick) that appeared to be the closest possible match, and I think it has the stuff that I want in it, but I failed to figure out how to properly extract it. Of course, there appears to not be any reasonable upstream source listed; heaven forbid that people who package things mention where they got the stuff that they packaged originally or provide it in some usable form for people who aren't using some Linux distribution.

And as usual, one of the innumerable little utilities that one has to have to get all this to work right has completely changed all of its options, configuration, and calling method. This happens every time I go to upgrade the CJK TeX installation. This time, it's ttf2pk, which has now spun off a separate ttf2tfm program which is supposed to be called with a variety of parameters that I don't know, and which bear no resemblence to the parameters that the old version of ttf2pk used. *mutter*

I'm currently taking apart Debian source packages to figure out how Debian solves these problems, and then reusing those techniques. This seems to be a promising approach, but this is all taking far longer than I was hoping.

So annoying.