Bug#496070: [ghostscript] opentypefont

[Fabian Greffrath <fabian@greffrath.com>]

Another argument for converting gsfonts to truetype:

Does FontForge read in the old kerning information from fonts?
    This question needs to be broken down into cases:

[...]
    PostScript Type1 fonts anywhere other than the Mac.
        The kerning information is not stored in a Type 1 font file. 
Instead it is stored in a file with the same filename as the font file 
but with the extension ".afm". When FontForge reads a PostScript font 
it will check for an associated afm file, and if found will read the 
kerning information from it.

From: <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/faq.html>

I have seen many bug reports in which people complained about 
improperly rendered web pages that had their prefered font set to 
either Helvetica of Nimbus Sans, which means that the type1 system 
fonts are selected for display. I am not sure, but I believe that the 
kerning information for these fonts are not taken into account in 
these cases. With truetype fonts (which have the information of both 
the afm and the pfb file compiled in by fontforge) this problem should 
be solved, while still preserving the original shape of the font.

Then we would only need fontconfig to select the truetype variant by 
default if unsure...

 - Fabian