[tex-live] urw35 base fonts on CTAN and TL
texlive at schoepfer.info
texlive at schoepfer.info
Sun Dec 17 12:06:30 CET 2017
On 2017-12-16 00:28, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> On 2017-12-12 at 17:09:45 +0100, texlive at schoepfer.info wrote:
>
> > On 19.09.2016 02:14, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> > > On 2016-09-19 at 00:10:08 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi Staszek,
> > > >
> > > > > E.g. on January 2015 there was much better release, and from
> July
> > > > > 2016 it seems that fonts are finally proper. Moreover the
> whole
> > > >
> > > > AFAIR these "new" fonts changed the metrics compared to
> previous
> > > > versions of some glyphs. Since these fonts are used as
> replacement
> > > > for the Base35 fonts, they need to be metric wise equal. But
> they
> > > > aren't.
> > > >
> > > > Then there is the addition of completely insufficient and
> broken
> > > > cyrillic... but I see that they have at least added the
> cyrillic
> > > > glyphs now for all fonts.
> > > >
> > > > I am really not sure what is the best way to proceed, and
> maybe the
> > > > new fonts are again metric wise compatible ...
> > >
> > > Hi Staszek and Norbert,
> > > the fonts do not only have to be metric compatible, they have to
> > > provide exactly the same sets of glyphs as the original fonts
> released
> > > by URW and maintained by Walter Schmidt.
> > >
> > > The ghostscript fonts shipped with TeX Live are the same as those
> > > which are part of the psnfss LaTeX package. And psnfss provides
> .tfm
> > > files for exactly these fonts. This is why I maintain these fonts
> in
> > > TeX Live at all.
> > >
> > > The main problem is that the fonts were extended but their
> internal
> > > names (the /FontName variable) were not changed. The Type 1 font
> > > specification (Adobe) clearly says that there shall never exist
> two
> > > different fonts with the same /FontName. For a good reason!
> > >
> > > Some time ago someone told me that he created a PostScript graphic
> but
> > > a particular glyph didn't appear in the document created with
> LaTeX
> > > though he could see this glyph in a PS viewer. It took me some
> time
> > > to find out what happened. It turned out that he used a glyph
> which
> > > wasn't supported by psnfss, pdftex assumed that the font provided
> by
> > > ghostscript and that in the texmf tree are identical and
> substituted
> > > the font. Such kind of problems are quite difficult to track
> down.
> > >
> > > I'll look into the new fonts anyway. But I don't think that we
> can
> > > use them because they are not compatible with what we have in TeX
> now.
> > >
> > > If they turn out to be useful, the only way to make them available
> to
> > > the TeX world is to rename all these fonts (/FontName), create TeX
> > > support files for them, and create two packages, one for TeX and
> one
> > > for ghostscript. I currently have no idea how to make such fonts
> > > accessible to ghostscript on all platforms.
> > >
> > > Please note that the problem I described above occured on Unix.
> > > Windows users are in advantage because both, TeX and ghostscript
> are
> > > using exactly the same fonts. On Unix there is currently no way
> to
> > > avoid such problems because TeX Live can't provide an adapted
> > > ghostscript installation for all supported platforms.
> >
> > If this works on Windows...
> > Is it correct, that if a linux distribution provides another/newest
> > version of urw-core35 type1 fonts and ghostscript, there is no
> Problem
> > with metrics or "same sets of glyphs" when texlive/psnfss uses the
> same
> > fonts by changing the corresponding map-files?
> > I assume generating font description(fd) files and virtual fonts(vf)
> > would also be necessary, or would there be much more to be done from
> a
> > linux distribution point of view?
>
> Hi Johannes,
> I fear that there is no satisfying solution.
Thank you very much for the detailed explanation!
> We currently have three
> different fonts with the same internal variable /FontName. Each
> supports a different set of glyphs.
>
> 1. TeX Live provides and supports the fonts gratefully donated by
> URW. None of the fonts were modified except NimbusSanL-ReguItal
> (uhvro8a.pfb) due to a severe bug in /germandbls, see
>
> http://tug.org/~kotucha/germandbls.pdf
>
> The original font is still available (uhvro8a-105.pfb).
>
> 2. Ghostscript has subsets of these URW fonts built into the binary.
> These fonts are used if there is no file called "Fontmap" in
> Ghostscript's search path (GS_LIB). Many glyphs were removed from
> the URW fonts but an additional glyph was added to the symbol
> font.
> According to Chris Liddell, a Ghostscript developer, the sole
> reason to provide any fonts at all is to have a replacement for
> the Adobe fonts built into PostScript printers. Thus glyphs not
> supported by Adobe were removed from the URW fonts.
With fontforge, i did a short compare of base35 font Times-Roman from
ctan with the newest fonts-core35 release from
https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts, which seem to be
the fonts builtin in the newest ghostscript 9.22, by
sfddiff base35/pfb/utmr8a.pfb fonts/NimbusRoman-Regular.t1
There are a lot of differences and new glyphs in the newer font, but it
seems the only glyph missing in the newer font is "commaaccent".
> 3. Ghostscript offers an external font package. It comes with its
> own Fontmap file and thus overrides the built-in fonts. These
> fonts come with additional (Cyrillic) glyphs.
I'm confused, you mean e.g this
https://packages.debian.org/stretch/gsfonts ?
> The problem is that all three fonts are incompatible but have the same
> /FontName.
[...]
> Nothing can be done in TeX Live in order to solve this problem. Every
> font can be supported if the necessary files are available but there
> is absolutely no way to support different fonts with the same name.
If it's true that the github-artifex base35 fonts only misses one glyph
per font,
Would it be possible to make the texlive psnfss package work with this
fonts?
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?
> Let me know if you are interested in a font package providing the
> original URW fonts for use with Ghostscript. During the next three
> weeks I'm on leave and thus have more time as usual.
Thank you very much for the offer, but i think i can do this on my own
in case.
Johannes
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