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

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Mon Dec 18 00:12:00 CET 2017


    seems the only glyph missing in the newer font is "commaaccent".

My recollection from looking at a previous update from URW is that there
were changes in the metrics and kerning tables too.

    Just to know if i got it right: If it can be done in texlive, would this 
    base35 problem be solved, if all distributions would "reset", and start 
    over to only use the newest base35 realease?

No. If we overtly changed the base35 fonts in TL, old documents will
typeset differently. That's not acceptable.

What can be done is to make a new font package with the new fonts, and
then people who want them can have them. Michael Sharpe did this for a
previous update from URW with just the "core 3",
Times/Helvetica/Courier, fonts: https://ctan.org/pkg/nimbus15
Michael's article about the work might be of interest:
  http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb37-2/tb116sharpe.pdf
(and his articles about his many other font projects might be of related
interest: http://tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/listauthor.html#Sharpe,Michael )

With enough work by the interested and willing parties, options could be
given to existing psnfss and other packages to switch to the new fonts,
once they are available. But we can't (or rather, I won't) just change
the fonts out from under the TeX world. --best, karl.


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