Hi Bob,

Thanks indeed for that fix. I copied a font file into each of those directories and reinstalled, then re-mkfontdir’d. It worked fine.

The VT510 I have here worked with the /terminal=vt220 and I could see the fonts fine. I’ll work out the keyboard ‘issues’ later J

Regards

Keith

From: Robert Armstrong [mailto:bob@jfcl.com]
Sent: 19 October 2022 16:11
To: 'The Hobbyist DECnet mailing list' <hecnet@lists.dfupdate.se>
Subject: [HECnet] Re: APL help needed

  The problem comes when the KITINSTAL tries to run MKFONTDIR for DECwindows

$ IF F$SEARCH("SYS$SYSTEM:DECW$MKFONTDIR.EXE;") .NES. ""

$ THEN

$    MKFONTDIR :== $DECW$MKFONTDIR

$    MKFONTDIR SYS$COMMON:[SYSFONT.DECW.USER_75DPI]

$    MKFONTDIR SYS$COMMON:[SYSFONT.DECW.USER_100DPI]

$ ENDIF

The error you see comes from MKFONTDIR – it’s trying to add the user defined APL fonts to the DECwindows font database, but VMSINSTAL hasn’t moved the new files there yet!  Hence, no font files found…  It’s clearly a bug in the KITINSTAL for this product and I can’t believe it ever got shipped that way, but there it is.

  You have a few options

1) Add some other font files to the user font area so MKFONTDIR won’t fail, but you’ll still have to run MKFONTDIR manually after the installation is done.

2) OR, temporarily “hide” SYS$SYSTEM:MKFONTDIR.EXE (e.g. rename it to FOO.EXE) so the F$SEARCH will return null and KITINSTAL will skip this step.  Then after the installation is done you’ll have to restore MKFONTDIR and also run it manually.

3) OR, fix the KITINSTAL.COM so that this command runs after the MOVEFILES phase, put the APL saveset A back together and install normally :)

Good luck,

Bob