Pigpen Fonts on macOS – Creating PDFs and Ensuring Unicode Compatibility

Question

Under macOS Big Sur using LaTeX the following document does not compile:

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage{pigpen}

\begin{document}

{\pigpenfont L}

\end{document}

It produces the following console output:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.23 (TeX Live 2022/dev) (preloaded format=pdflatex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./test.tex
LaTeX2e <2021-11-15> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2022-01-12>
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2021/10/04 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/pigpen/pigpen.sty
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/pigpen/pigpen.tex))
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-pdftex.def)
(./test.aux) [1{/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdfte
x.map}] (./test.aux) )</usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/am
sfonts/cm/cmr10.pfb><</usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/pig
pen/pigpen.pfa>>
!pdfTeX error: /Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex: builtin glyph names is empty
 ==> Fatal error occurred, no output PDF file produced!

Does anybody know where the problem could be? It worked last year…

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

2024 update an updated map file has been uploaded to ctan so the fix below will not be needed.

---

From texlive 2021 onwards LaTeX by default includes a glyph to Unicode mapping. This font apparently fails in that setting. You can disable this mapping:

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage{pigpen}
\pdfgentounicode=0
\begin{document}

{\pigpenfont L}



\end{document}

You can just disable this for pigpen but leave the unicode mappings for other defaults by over-riding the pigpen map file

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage{pigpen}
% \pdfgentounicode=0
\pdfmapline{=pigpen <pigpen.pfa}
\begin{document}

{\pigpenfont L}



\end{document}