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Re: Ghostscript CMap files



On 01/24/2011 09:04 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
Hi Till and others (esp. gs-cjk-resource maintainers),

I noticed that recent Ghostscript packaging for [Ubuntu] dropped the
indirection of CMap files.

I am not knowledgeable in DeFoMa, but recent changelog entry of
gs-cjk-resource seems to indicate that even dropping DeFoMa it still
makes sense to preserve the indirection.

Ghostscript 9 made progress in releasing CMap files under a DFSG-free
license, but still some of them need to be stripped, so I suspect some
users still rely on gs-cjk-resource for their needs with Ghostscript.


The use of Ghostscript's CMap file solves some non-CJK bugs:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ghostscript/+bug/321932
http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=691345

My suggestion is symlinking the CMap files of gs-cjk-resource into the CMap directory of Ghostscript or by simply letting them get installed into Ghostscript's CMap directory. If the files are already shipped by Ghostscript, the gs-cjk-resource and/or cmap-adobe-japan1 packages will get superfluous and should get removed from Debian.

Note that according to the licenses in the debian/copyright files of gs-cjk-resource and cmap-adobe-japan1 all contained files are free software provided by Adobe. As the files stripped from Ghostscript are non-free files from Adobe, it looks like for me the gs-cjk-resource and cmap-adobe-japan1 do not provide the functionality of the stripped files.

The stripped proprietary CMap files of Ghostscript address only very old CJK PDF files, of the Adobe Acrobat Reader 3-6 generation. We would need a sample file to see whether gs-cjk-resource and cmap-adobe-japan1 would be able to make these files rendered.

Are you certain your change do not negatively affect users of
gs-cjk-resource? If so, please elaborate on what more detailed this
change consist of, so that I might adopt it for the Debian packaging.

My change's intention is to use Ghostscript's upstream source as far as possible, to make it easier to pass bugs reported to us to the upstream developers and also to get fixes and changes done and tested by the Ghostscript developers. The gs-cjk-resource and cmap-adobe-japan1 should be modified to not duplicate any of the files which ship with Ghostscript and to add files which are useful.

   Till


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