[tex-live] getnonfreefonts

[Paulo Ney de Souza]

There are about 50 fonts in CTAN which are in TDS and are not part of
TeXLive. If is zip, tar, rpm ... it is not really different, the important
part if that TDS organization is ready.

Now the format is all over the place: MF, Type 1, TrueType ... and a LOT of
that work to classify them will have to be done. But my point is -- this
should be done only ONCE and then all users of TeXLive could reap the
benefits, instead of the situation that we have right now where this has to
be re-done and re-done by each individual user ... and probably with a very
low rate of success because of the cumbersome process.

15 years ago there was a reason to keep some fonts out of TeXLive - the
space on the CD being probably the most important, but right now there
seems to be no reason to keep them out.

There are two ways to do it:

  A- Include them on TeXLive

  B- Make their download and installation automatic via a script.

and my question was essentially -- which way is preferable?

There are NO reasons why font-installation should not be a completely
automated process. It is like that already for some (the 10 fonts covered
by getnonfreefonts, MathTimePro, MinionMath, ...) but the scripts are
proliferating without any need for it. The script for the last two
literally mimic getnonfreefonts line by line.

Paulo Ney de Souza



On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 2:36 AM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Saying that something is packaged does not give any useful information.
> How is it packaged, as zip, rpm, deb, ...? If it is a zip, what is the
> directory structure inside it? What is the format of the font, is it MF,
> Type 1, TrueType, OpenType? What is the encoding of the font? Which
> languages and scripts are supported? If a font is properly packaged, it
> means that all this information is present in a metafile understandable to
> an infrastructure that is able to put the files to correct directories and
> is able to inform the operating system and/or a particular TeX distribution
> that the font is available. CTAN usually contains archive files, not
> packages. In order to use them a user has to collect all this information
> and install the font. There is nothing like super simple font installation
> unless it is an OpenType font and you can just copy the *.otf to a system
> directory.
>
>
> Zdeněk Wagner
> http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
>
> 2016-04-13 2:41 GMT+02:00 Paulo Ney de Souza <pauloney at gmail.com>:
>
>> We are talking about fonts that have already been packaged - this is
>> about installation and not packaging for TeX.
>>
>> Paulo Ney
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 5:38 PM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> > elsewhere) which are not available on TL. This is vexing because the
>>> > technology to make these installs a single command line like ...
>>> >
>>> >     font-install Antiqua
>>>
>>>         $ font-install Antiqua
>>>         bash: font-install: command not found
>>>
>>> I don't know what you are talking about that super simple font
>>> installation, but I can guarantee you - and I have packaged a lot of
>>> fonts - that font installation cross platform is not trivial.
>>>
>>> Norbert
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> PREINING, Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
>>> JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
>>> GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0  ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>
>>
>
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