[tex-live] Real Helvetica?

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Wed Sep 22 00:36:20 CEST 2010


2010/9/22 Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>
>
> Zdenek Wagner wrote:
>
>> Yes, Helvetica is present in HP printers.
>
> I meant "the Helvetica /font/" comes bundled with some
> HP products.  I have eight HP Helvetica fonts here,
> none of which have I explicitly purchased.
>
Yes, but are you sure that they have the same metrics as the phv*.tfm
files in TeX and that they really contain all accented characters that
are present in TeX encodings? For instance, OS/2 contains Helvetica
since version 3.0 that was released some 20 years ago but unlike
Nimbus fonts it has problems in encoding. Output in Czech and Slovak
will be useless due to bugs in characters \v{d}, \v{t}, \v{l} and \'l.
For some time I used tweaked font map for "real" Helvetica, Times etc.
The correct characters were present in the fomt but under wrong PS
names. Thus in my font maps I had to insert a modified phv*.enc
vectors and embed the files that came with OS/2. Fortunatelly after
inserting that *.enc files they matched the TFM files. What I want to
write is that it is dangerous to insert unknown font just because it
has some name. I once forgot to embed the real font (I gave the file
intended for my HP printer) to DTP for preparing the offset films and
unsusable films cost me a few houndred USD. I know a man who did
somethiong similar but unfortunatelly it was spot when everything was
printed and bound. The price of the books that have to be put to
garbage and printed again (500 misprints per page is really too many)
was about 30 thousand USD. Are you ready to undergo such a risk?

> Philip Taylor
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



More information about the tex-live mailing list