Theoretically, at least, you should have everything installed correctly and ready to run. teTeX is a very large system, and you want to start by learning slowly, instead of being overwhelmed by the necessary complexities of the system.
So, instead of watching TeX typeset
``Hello, World!''
as Professor Knuth suggests in the TeXbook, we'll produce a couple of teTeX's own documents through the system in order to test it.
You should be logged in as root the first time you run teTeX. If you aren't, metafont may not be able to create the necessary directories for its fonts. Metafont will complain that it can't make the directories, and you won't see any output because you will have a bunch of zero-length font characters. This is no problem. Simply log out, re-login as root, and repeat the offending operation.
Of course, it doesn't mention this in teTeX's manual. But the nice thing about teTeX is that, if you blow it, no real harm is done. It's not like a compiler, where, say, you will trash the root partition if a pointer goes astray. What, you haven't read the teTeX manual yet? Of course you haven't! It's still in the distribution in source code form, waiting to be output!
So, without further delay, you will want to read the teTeX manual. It's located in the directory
/usr/lib/teTeX/texmf/doc/tetex.Without further adieu, type
latex TETEXDOC.tex
The other warnings can be safely ignored. They simply are warning you that some of the ftp paths mentioned in the documentation are too wide for their alloted spaces. (If you're really inquisitive, look at one of the TeX references for a discussion of \hbox and \vbox.)
LaTeX will have generated several files from TETEXDOC.tex. The one we're interested in is TETEXDOC.dvi. This is the device-independent output that you're going to send to the printer. There are several printer drivers included with teTeX, which allow you to change the dvi file into a fax, into plain text, or print it on a HP Laserjet. There are other dvi drivers available at CTAN sites. However, the best option, in my humble opinion, is convert the file to PostScript using dvips, which is included with the package. It isn't difficult. The command
dvips TETEXDOC.dvi -o TETEXDOC.ps
This is where the real work begins. (And you thought you were finished!) Dvips has invoked metafont, which is now happily generating all of the fonts that the teTeX User's Manual needs in order to print correctly. There are about half-a-dozen fonts in all, which can take anywhere from 5 minutes to several days (on a 10 MHZ 386 or something equally primitive) to generate.
If you're lucky (and rich) and have a PostScript printer, you can simply dump TETEXDOC.ps to the printer with a command like
lpr TETEXDOC.ps.
The first thing you want to do (after dvips has completed writing TETEXDOC.ps) is invoke ghostscript to see its command line arguments, like this:
gs -help
The command line I would use is:
gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=cdjmono -sOutputFile=/tmp/gs.out TETEXDOC.ps -c quit
lpr /tmp/gs.out
I'll probably write a HOWTO about dviware sometime in the future. Until then, the best thing to do is simply play with ghostscript to explore its various previewing options; failing that, you are strongly encouraged to use dvitty -- this will give you ascii-readable text you can page through with less or Xless. It's only an approximation of what the printed output will look like, of course, but well worth the incovenience, given the amount of paper saved.
So, until you are able to view documents easily on-screen, please recycle your paper. If possible, purchase recycled photocopy paper to print on. You don't want your workplace to look like a branch office of Georgia-Pacific.
Remember: Save a tree... kill an editor.
Robert Kiesling
Robert_A._Kiesling@macline.com ... No writing gig too small ...