[texhax] Any crazy math formulas for testing a TeX language interpreter

[Barbara Beeton]

re the bcs test, doug mckenna reports:

    Fortunately, Barbara Beeton kindly found in archives and sent me the entire bcs test ported to the plain format.  I pasted all of its source code into my monograph test file and, feeling like I was about to jump off a cliff, typeset it with both pdfTeX and JSBox.

what i sent wasn't ported from latex to
plain; it was (i believe) the original
which *was* prepared in plain tex.  the
file is dated october 1985, which may
be later than the original date, but is
certainly from before latex was really
in wide use.

    Yeah, baby!  Chemical symbols, circuit layout, math, and all.

congratulations!  that's good news!

    Well, $100\% - \epsilon$.  The only discrepancy I could find among all of the tests was a couple of missing symbols (one is the Wierstrauss P maybe), due (I think) to not including the "msbm10" and "ecsx1200" fonts in the collection of fonts visible to the client program.

    I have gleaned from various sources that the otherwise opaque "msbm" stands for "Math Society Blackboard Bold Math" or similar, and that "ecsx" stands for "European Computer Modern Symbol eXtensions" or similar.

"ms" is really "math symbols" series b.
i think your parsing of "ecsx" is correct.
however, that font shouldn't be needed.
maybe the test that needs it wasn't from
the bcs test file?

    The glyphs in msbm10 are in the distribution tree (e.g., msbm10.pfb) but I don't understand where pdfTeX is finding/mapping the glyphs to use for the ecsx1200.tfm file.  The only file with "ecsx" in its name I can find in the tree is the MetaFont ".mf" source file.  I need a ".pfb" or other file that can be converted to ".otf".

i've just rerun the file through pdftex,
and obtained the list of fonts used.
they are all in the distribution tree in
the area
  fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/

these fonts are reported in the log:
  cmbx10.pfb
  cmex10.pfb
  cmmi10.pfb
  cmmi5.pfb
  cmmi7.pfb
  cmr10.pfb
  cmr5.pfb
  cmr7.pfb
  cmsy10.pfb
  cmsy5.pfb
  cmsy7.pfb
  cmti10.pfb
all computer modern.

is there any sentiment for posting the
bcs test file on ctan?  (i'll have to
navigate the rules for licenses, which
have changed radically since this file
was created, but will do so if there's
interest.)
					-- bb