[gs-devel] Status of the bundled 35 base fonts

[Chris Liddell]

On 18/02/11 08:51, Bastien ROUCARIES wrote:
> n Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Fabian Greffrath<fabian at greffrath.com>  wrote:
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>> Am 17.02.2011 22:07, schrieb Chris Liddell:
>>>
>>> I was under the impression we shipped the original URW fonts (we
>>> discussed modifying the metrics for a different issue last year, and
>>> rejected the idea), but looking in the font files, it seems we do have
>>> Valek's additions in at least some of the fonts.
>>
>> Ghostscript ships the urwcyr fonts with Valek's glyph additions for quite
>> some time, just not the most recent version. The TeX people however ship the
>> original URW++ fonts and they seem to have good reason for that:
>>
>>         One reason Walter decided to use the original URW fonts is
>>         that they had been regarded as replacements for the built-in
>>         printer fonts. People can use the URW fonts for previewing
>>         and the built-in printer fonts for printing.  In this case it
>>         doesn't make sense to add any new glyphs because they will
>>         not appear on paper anyway.
>>
>> From<http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2009-May/020951.html>
>>
>> In the same thread they recommend the use of TeX Gyre fonts if additional
>> Glyphs to the original URW fonts are required.
>>
>>> Given that, I don't see any immediate problem using the latest
>>> versions, however, it's not my just my call, I will have to discuss it
>>> with the other Ghostscript developers.
>>
>> Yes, please do so. It is quite cumbersome for Linux distributions to handle
>> three veriations of the same fonts (i.e. the original URW++ ones from TeX,
>> the urwcyr variant that Ghostscript ships and the latest urwcyr variant as
>> released by Valek).
>
> I should add that debian will be pleased if you could also release SFD
> source of the fonts instead of fonts directly. We could supply sfd
> source for the first release and script to build PFB from the SFD.
>
> I will greatly use maintenance and updating in case of problem of the fonts.

We don't actually have the SFD font sources, so this becomes a question 
of who does the work to convert the fonts to SFD. Since there's no value 
in it for Ghostscript, I doubt I could commit to it on behalf of 
Ghostscript in the long term.

Since the fonts very rarely change, I could create the SFD files, and 
make them available, but that would risk them "rotting" on the rare 
occasions they do change.

A better solution, I think, would be if I wrote a fontforge script to 
trivialise the conversion process, and include that in the Ghostscript 
release - would that suffice?

Chris