[tex-live] aifont

Skip Collins skip.collins at gmail.com
Sat Jul 19 00:35:01 CEST 2008


About 9 or 10 years ago I put together a collection of virtual fonts
that were intended to work around some problems that showed up when
editing TeX postscript and pdf output in drawing packages such as
Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. At that time CM/AMS Type 1 fonts
caused problems in these programs because of their odd encodings. I
distributed this package with the name aifont, the 'ai' part referring
to Adobe Illustrator. These files are included in the TeX Live
texmf-dist tree.

Recently I was asked to update the package to to support the new
version of the CM/AMS fonts that are being produced by the AMS with
unicode glyph names. I don't use Illustrator these days, so I
downloaded a trial version to see whether the problems I encountered a
decade ago are still present in modern versions of the vector drawing
program. It turns out that Adobe Illustrator CS3 running in Windows XP
does not exhibit those problems. The old Type 1 CM/AMS fonts work fine
without aifont. I presume the updated versions will too. I therefore
recommend that all files associated with aifont not be included in the
next release of TeX Live. The following directories should be deleted:
texmf-dist/fonts/tfm/public/ai/
texmf-dist/fonts/map/dvips/ai/
texmf-dist/fonts/enc/dvips/ai/
texmf-dist/dvips/ai/
texmf-dist/source/fonts/ai/
texmf-dist/doc/fonts/ai/

Thanks,
Skip Collins


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