[tex-live] dvipsDownloadBase35 now true by default

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Mon Sep 12 20:20:59 CEST 2011


There have been a few reports of problems stemming from the longstanding
setting of dvipsDownloadBase35=false.  That `false' causes dvips *not*
to embed the pfb's for the 35 base PostScript fonts in its output.

As a result, if the eventual PostScript interpreter (e.g., Ghostscript)
has noticeably different fonts from what we have, the result is skewed.
This is the case with Zapf Chancery in the current Ghostscript release,
as Michael Sharpe found out when he tried to use it as a math script font.

Not downloading in dvips made sense in the early years, when file size
was critical, a printer was most often doing the interpreting, and there
were hardly any variations of the base 35 fonts around.  None of those
things are true any more.

I've just now changed the default in updmap-hdr.cfg, and the live
updmap.cfg and map files in the TL source repository.  So the few people
running TeX from svn will notice the difference right away.

In the normal case of TL installation, well, it depends.  The file that
will be updated tonight is updmap-hdr.cfg.  If you handle map updates
yourself, you'll need to edit your updmap.cfg in TEXMF(SYS)CONFIG by
hand and then rerun updmap(-sys).  If you use updmap-local.cfg, running
tlmgr generate updmap and then updmap-sys as usual should do it.  If you
want to have the change at all.  (If you want more info on all this
stuff, see the tlmgr help output, online at
http://tug.org/texlive/doc/tlmgr.html#generate__option_____what.)

If any questions or problems, let us know.

karl

P.S. For many years now the default for pdftex and dvipdfm(x) has been
to embed everything.  This is not affected.  We're just changing dvips
(well, actually psfonts.map) to do the same.


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