Re: Discussion - non-free software removal
On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 11:51:13PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> However there are still some necessary non-free packages. Some of the xpdf
> add-on language support packages, particularly xpdf-japanese,
> xpdf-chinese-* etc are in non-free because they include CMap (character
> map) files from Adobe. Without these packages some PDF files are
> unviewable with Xpdf. In fact, there is no free way to view these files at
> all - gv/ghostscript includes the same files in another non-free package,
> and the only other option is acroread.
Is there not sufficient documentation to enable someone (with sufficient
motivation) to create free replacements for these character map files?
> The latest Xpdf (2.00) uses Motif. The binaries in the xpdf-reader package
> are linked with LessTif but unfortunately it works quite a bit better with
> Open Motif from non-free. For some PDFs in some locales, Xpdf segfaults.
> It may be worth creating an xpdf-reader-openmotif package for contrib.
> Here's another case of no free working solution.
Here's another case where use of non-free software is being proposed as an
alternative to fixing free software. xpdf works quite well on a majority of
documents; is it not preferable to fix the remaining cases, rather than to
spend time on Open Motif, or (worse) some obnoxious acroread installer?
--
- mdz
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