[tex-live] urw35 base fonts on CTAN and TL

[texlive at schoepfer.info]

On 19.09.2016 02:14, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> On 2016-09-19 at 00:10:08 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> 
>   > Hi Staszek,
>   >
>   > > E.g. on January 2015 there was much better release, and from July
>   > > 2016 it seems that fonts are finally proper. Moreover the whole
>   >
>   > AFAIR these "new" fonts changed the metrics compared to previous
>   > versions of some glyphs. Since these fonts are used as replacement
>   > for the Base35 fonts, they need to be metric wise equal. But they
>   > aren't.
>   >
>   > Then there is the addition of completely insufficient and broken
>   > cyrillic... but I see that they have at least added the cyrillic
>   > glyphs now for all fonts.
>   >
>   > I am really not sure what is the best way to proceed, and maybe the
>   > new fonts are again metric wise compatible ...
> 
> Hi Staszek and Norbert,
> the fonts do not only have to be metric compatible, they have to
> provide exactly the same sets of glyphs as the original fonts released
> by URW and maintained by Walter Schmidt.
> 
> The ghostscript fonts shipped with TeX Live are the same as those
> which are part of the psnfss LaTeX package.  And psnfss provides .tfm
> files for exactly these fonts.  This is why I maintain these fonts in
> TeX Live at all.
> 
> The main problem is that the fonts were extended but their internal
> names (the /FontName variable) were not changed.  The Type 1 font
> specification (Adobe) clearly says that there shall never exist two
> different fonts with the same /FontName.  For a good reason!
> 
> Some time ago someone told me that he created a PostScript graphic but
> a particular glyph didn't appear in the document created with LaTeX
> though he could see this glyph in a PS viewer.  It took me some time
> to find out what happened.  It turned out that he used a glyph which
> wasn't supported by psnfss, pdftex assumed that the font provided by
> ghostscript and that in the texmf tree are identical and substituted
> the font.  Such kind of problems are quite difficult to track down.
> 
> I'll look into the new fonts anyway.  But I don't think that we can
> use them because they are not compatible with what we have in TeX now.
> 
> If they turn out to be useful, the only way to make them available to
> the TeX world is to rename all these fonts (/FontName), create TeX
> support files for them, and create two packages, one for TeX and one
> for ghostscript.  I currently have no idea how to make such fonts
> accessible to ghostscript on all platforms.
> 
> Please note that the problem I described above occured on Unix.
> Windows users are in advantage because both, TeX and ghostscript are
> using exactly the same fonts.  On Unix there is currently no way to
> avoid such problems because TeX Live can't provide an adapted
> ghostscript installation for all supported platforms.

If this works on Windows...
Is it correct, that if a linux distribution provides another/newest 
version of urw-core35 type1 fonts and ghostscript, there is no Problem 
with metrics or "same sets of glyphs" when texlive/psnfss uses the same 
fonts by changing the corresponding map-files?
I assume generating font description(fd) files and virtual fonts(vf) 
would also be necessary, or would there be much more to be done from a 
linux distribution point of view?

Johannes