Bug#546251: Please make fonts available to other applications
Package: texlive-fonts-recommended
Version: 2007.dfsg.1-5
While reading some LaTeX package documentation today, I happened to
notice that Debian includes a version of Palatino (or URW Palladio)
with real small capitals and old-style figures in /usr/share/
texmf-texlive/fonts/ type1/public/fpl/. This quite surprised me, since
I had thought that Computer Modern (or Latin Modern) is one of the
very few free software font families that contain them - I thought I
had looked through the various TTF and PostScript fonts available in
Debian quite carefully.
The fonts in texlive-fonts-recommended don't seem to be registered for
other applications, even though some of them appear to be normal Type1
fonts. Thus they cannot be found, for example, by looking at the list
of fonts offered by Scribus or OpenOffice or xfontsel in Debian. The
fc-list utility from fontconfig also does not seem to know about them.
I don't really know what Debian's policy on fonts says or where
exactly such fonts could be registered (defoma maybe?) so that they
are found. But I think it would be useful to make these fonts easily
available also to non-TeX users.
A quick glance at
http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org/review/pkg-texlive-fonts-recommended.html
suggests three or four font families that don't appear to be present
in other packages:
- the small-caps and old-style-figure Palatino variations in
/usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/public/fpl/
e.g., fplrc8a.pfb
- the condensed Helvetica variant in
/usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/urw/helvetic/
e.g., uhvr8ac.pfb
- Adobe Utopia in
/usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/adobe/utopia/
e.g., putr8a.pfb
- possibly the fraktur-style txmia and pxmia fonts, although I'm not
sure if they are designed to be used in text or only in math:
/usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/public/txfonts/txmia.pfb
/usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/public/txfonts/txbmia.pfb
/usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/public/pxfonts/pxmia.pfb
/usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/public/pxfonts/pxbmia.pfb
Most of the others appear to have copies in gsfonts and lmodern that
are already present in, e.g., fc-list.
Maybe this is slightly related to bug #327480, although that talks
more about providing the more exotic variants of Computer Modern that
are (or were?) not present in lmodern.
Also, there appear to be quite a few more nice-looking fonts in
texlive-fonts-extra. They would also be nice to see in the font lists
of non-TeX applications (at least the ones with Roman alphabets - I'm
not sure if the others are encoded in a way that is easy to use from,
e.g., openoffice).
--
-=- Rjs -=- rjs@cs.hut.fi, Riku.Saikkonen@hut.fi
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