Re: Free documents using non-free fonts - can they be in main?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu> wrote:

>>   As a consequence, you can't be sure to get the same document by simply
>>   running pdflatex over the source file.
>
> This is an excellent reason for why the documentation *should* be
> rebuilt.  How do you know that you can make a reasonable document
> unless you build it yourself?

If the usual dtx mantra:

pdflatex <package>.dtx
makeindex -s gind.ist
makeindex -s gglo.ist -o <package>.gls <package>.glo
pdflatex <package>.dtx

runs without errors, you know that you *can* make a reasonable document,
but you have not necessarily just created one.

> How do you fix errors in the document?
> As Bas wrote, all binaries must be built from source.  This is one of
> many reasons why.

This has never happened for LaTeX documentation, and nobody has ever
complained.  The CTAN policy has recently been amended to require (or is
it still "encourage"?) that authors include the ready-made PDF version
of the documentation exactly because of the problems with local
configuration.

Furthermore, we simply won't be able to do the work for all those
documents:

$ dlocate -L tetex-doc | egrep '\.dvi\.gz|\.pdf\.gz' |wc -l
337

at least not in a reasonable timeframe.  

And it still doesn't answer my question whether we can distribute
documents prepared with a non-free, distributable font.

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)