Re: TeX Licenses & teTeX (Was: Re: forwarded message from Jeff Licquia)
On Mon, 5 Aug 2002 21:22:24 +0200, Frank Mittelbach
<frank.mittelbach@latex-project.org> wrote:
>no i'm saying that my understanding of his
[Donald E. Knuth's]
>intentions is that he wants to
>ensure that within a TeX system (ie program plus surroundings)
>
> \font\foo=cmr10
>
>refers to his CMR10 and
>
> \input plain
>
>to his plain.tex
I believe that the following quote from fontname.texi (author Karl Berry,
de-TeXInfo-ified by me) makes the interpretation that he reserves the right
to enforce this legally rather unlikely.
>A fontname mapping file
>=======================
>
>At the moment, most implementations of TeX look up a TFM file (as
>part of the \font command), by searching for a file with the name
>given by the user (possibly in any of series of directories). But
>if we also looked TFM names up in *another* file (or set of files),
>which specifies the actual filename, the fontname given in the TeX
>source file could be almost anything at all, of any length.
>
>In version 5.851d of Web2c, I implemented this mapping file. Each
>file texfonts.map in a search path is read for abbreviations. The
>file has a straightforward format: each line specifies the filename
>and the TeX name for one font, separated by whitespace. Extra
>information on the line is ignored; then more information could be
>specified for the benefit of DVI-reading programs in the same file.
>Comments start with % and continue to the end of the line.
>
>Besides allowing long names, this sort of mapping file has other
>benefits. TeX source or DVI files can be more easily transported,
>because the font names in a particular file can be made work on
>every system. Also, when combined with a consistent naming scheme,
>macros could be written to access any of a number of fonts. Right
>now, each font family has to have specialized macros written to
>deal with it.
(Background info for the Debianites: What Karl describes above could be
useful with the font selection scheme set up by plain.tex, but I don't
think it is used much these days. Instead the de facto standard is to use
the New Font Selection Scheme, which is integrated with LaTeX2e but also
exists in a version for use with PlainTeX.)
>Incidentally, Professor Knuth has approved this as a legitimate
>``system-dependent'' extension; a TeX with such a feature can still
>be called ``TeX''.
Hence if anyone was to add the line
ptmr7t cmr10
to texfonts.map in a Web2C system (such as teTeX) then \font\foo=cmr10
would no longer load Knuth's cmr10. Apparently this does not contradict the
trademark license on TeX (provided we can trust Karl Berry on this matter,
but I think we can).
Lars Hellström
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