[tex-live] TL 2007 problems: MarVoSym and dviout.exe woes

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Harald Koenig writes:

 > questions: 
 > 
 > - are these known problems of marvosym.pfb and/or dviout.exe ?

Seems that hinting is incorrect.  Can you compare both versions with
t1lint?  It's very verbose when I run it on marvosym.pfb.  Maybe
fontforge fixes some bugs.  And forget about md5sum, I guess that
fontforge at least writes a comment to the top of the file.  It's
better to disassemble the fonts (t1disasm) and use diff(1) to compare
them.

I'm sure that dviout.exe is not involved.  The error message comes
from ghostscript, though I never heard ghostscript beeping.  But a
terminal with full ASCII support should beep if you send ^G (BELL) to
it, which can happen if you send a binary file to it.  If your friend
installed ghostscript from the TeXLive-2007 CD/DVD, he certainly has
version 8.54 while you have version 8.15.  I suppose that he will get
the same result as you when he downgrades to version 8.15.

I'm not sure which version of gs should go into TL-2008.  Staszek used
the latest GNU version available at this time.  Karl told me that
older versions often work better for him but I had no time for testing
anything myself.  And as far as I recall, Windows and UNIX versions of
gs behave a little bit different in some situations.  

You would help us a lot if you

    a) check with t1lint whether the font created by fontforge is ok.
       You can also try Peter Szabo's type1fix (part of textrace),

    b) ask your friend to try ghostscript 8.15.

If the font is ok and gs-8.15 works better than gs-8.54, I'll create a
ghostscript package for TeXLive-2008 depending on version 8.15.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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