[tex-live] libertine wrongly packaged

[George N. White III]

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 6:18 AM, Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> wrote:

> Am Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:20:52 -0800 schrieb Karl Berry:
>
>>     As far as I know with TeXLive xetex doesn't find otf
>>         fonts in the texmf-trees with the default configuration.
>>
>> That is not true.  That is how I use it.  If you use {foo.otf} instead
>> of {Foo} it will be found.
>
> But then you are again using file name lookups which can make a
> document less portable as file names (like e.g. in the case of the
> linux libertine fonts) can change.
>

Filenames are also a problem in workflows that require use of 3rd
party tools that require "system" font names.   Some organizations
(particulaly those with concerns over long-term archival storage
and/or supporting users with disabilities) require that PDF's used
the base13 fonts for regular text and allow embedded fonts only
for special symbols, so users want to specify {Times}, {Helvetica},
and {Courier} (and must take care to avoid using the italic symbols
that have different appearance in Arial Italic and Helvetica Oblique!).

In practice, such documents are  rendered with entirely different
fonts on different platforms, and for archival documents with fonts
that don't yet exist.

With pdflatex, there was an option to include the font map
records in the document, so there was a clear record of the
fonts that were used when the document was created, and
changes in font usage could be recorded as comments.

>
>> Barbara already responded to the other points.
>
> No Barbara pointed out that a pdf should embed fonts to be portable
> and that one should check which ressources a documents needs if one
> sent it to another location. Both is obvious.

Barbara was discussing the case of documents sent out for phototypsetting.
There are many other workflows where a single (la)tex template will be
used to create partial documents (chapters for a multi-author report) that
needs to work across a wide range of TeX distros both old and new,
and may contain figures, etc. prepared using 3rd party tools by people
who may not ever see the .tex sources and that support only "system" fonts.
In such cases you need to tell authors to have figures prepared using
"Foo" -- if you tell them to use foo.otf the result will be more confusion.

> But we discussed the difference between fonts calls in a *tex*
> document. You claimed
>
>>> When a document uses system font lookups, it is unportable by
>>> definition. I don't think that is a good scenario to
>>> encourage.
>
> Why do you want to discourage people to call system ressources in
> their TeX-documents?  Why do you think it is a problem if my xetex
> document contains a \setmainfont{my-special-system-font} which is
> then embedded in the final pdf? Naturally this tex source is not
> portable: if I sent it to someone else I would have to add the font,
> like I would have to add the graphics loaded by this document. But
> why is this a problem for you? Sending ressources like local styles,
> local fonts, local graphics etc along with a document is a standard
> procedure.

It is also standard to rely on certain fonts being present in many systems.

There is a problem demonstrated by the many people who report
problems such as xdvipdfmx not finding a system font that is found
by xetex.   In my view, such problems are unavoidable, but the impact
on users can be reduced by making it easier for users (and non-TeXy
sysadms) to understand and resolve the problem.

What about something like:

\setmainfont[suggest=foo.otf]{Foo} -- use foo.otf if found, fallback
to system Foo
\setmainfont[fallback=foo.otf]{Foo} -- use System Foo if found,
fallback to foo.otf

Ideally, when foo.otf is used, there would be a check to insure that
the fontname
matches.  Otherwise, there will be a new class of problems when the filename
refers to a different font (e.g., when users cut and paste but forget
to adjust the
filename because it is buried in a long list of options).


-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia