[tex-live] TeX and recent ghostscript changes

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Thu Sep 21 01:45:02 CEST 2017


On 2017-09-18 at 16:17:20 -0600, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:

 > There is a round of release candidates in progress for ghostscript: I
 > installed version 9.21 here on 5-Sep-2017, and since then 9.22rc1
 > appeared on 13-Sep-2017.  There are discussions of this on the
 > developers list (archives at
 > 
 > 	http://ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-devel/
 > 
 > ), but one message today in particular caught my eye, and may be
 > useful information for the TeX Live team:
 > 
 > >> ...
 > >> To: ken.sharp at artifex.com
 > >> From: Masamichi Hosoda <trueroad at trueroad.jp>
 > >> Subject: Re: [gs-devel] Ghostscript/GhostPDL 9.22 Release Candidate 1
 > >> 
 > >> >> > Please give them a try on your system if you're interested
 > >> >> > in helping test the release-in-progress. Your feedback is
 > >> >> > appreciated.
 > >> >>
 > >> >>It seems that `-dPDFDontUseFontObjectNum` option does not work.

Thank you very much for the link, Nelson.

It's a matter of fact that it's difficult to merge two subsets of a
particular font.

They claim that two fonts with the same name are not necessarily
identical.  Of cource, they are.  The Type 1 specification clearly
requires that there are no different fonts with the same /FontName.
All font vendors are aware of this requirement and consider it.  There
are no two fonts with the same /FontName.

Only Ghostscript provides completely different versions of the URW
fonts with the same /FontName and /UniqueID.

The fonts you can download have more glyphs than the original fonts
donated by URW, the fonts compiled into the Ghostscript binary have
less glyphs than the original URW fonts.  The built-in symbol font has
an additional glyph which is not available in the fonts you can
dowmload from ghostscript.com or in the original URW fonts.

But all these three variants have the same /FontName and the same
/UniqueID.

Hence the problem is home-brewed.  I still don't understand why one
can be so silly to provide three completely different fonts with the
same /UniqueID.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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