Bug#661764: dangling symlink /usr/share/ghostscript/9.05/Resource/CIDFSubst/DroidSansFallback.ttf

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> On 12-03-01 at 08:54am, Ian Zimmerman wrote:

>> In general, I think useless dangling symlinks are a bug even if they
>> don't cause tangible harm, just as for example documentation reference
>> to a feature that no longer exists would be a bug.  They impede
>> administrators' (and developers') understanding of the package.
>
> I agree with you that it is a bug (even by Policy IIRC).

Not in policy §10.5 "symbolic links", as least.

Maybe this could be addressed by adding some documentation, e.g. in
README.Debian:

	Ghostscript uses the DroidSansFallback font from the fonts-droid
	package to substitute for CID-keyed fonts that are not available
	(used for East Asian character sets in PDFs).  If disk space is
	scarce, remove the fonts-droid package and the glyphs from
	missing fonts will be rendered as bullets.

	See Use.htm#CIDFontSubstitution from the ghostscript-doc package
	for details.

and in the package description:

	.
	By default, Ghostscript uses a font from the fonts-droid package
	to approximate glyphs in PDFs for which the requested CJK
	TrueType font is missing.  If the fonts-droid package is not
	installed, these glyphs will be rendered as bullets.

Background:

| commit 18a51701
| Author: Chris Liddell <chris.liddell@artifex.com>
| Date:   Tue Dec 13 11:46:53 2011 +0000
|
|     Bug 690779: Provide fallback for missing CIDFonts in PDF
|
|     Rather than throw an error when a PDF references a CIDFont that is not
|     available, we'll now fall back to using DroidSansFallback.ttf, by default.
|
|     This gives a reasonable analogue of other PDF consumers' behavior.

What would happen if the symlink were removed and the following patch
applied?

 gs/Resource/Init/gs_cidfm.ps |    2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git i/gs/Resource/Init/gs_cidfm.ps w/gs/Resource/Init/gs_cidfm.ps
index 3f0a2076..68143909 100644
--- i/gs/Resource/Init/gs_cidfm.ps
+++ w/gs/Resource/Init/gs_cidfm.ps
@@ -110,7 +110,7 @@ currentdict end def
       (/) concatstrings
     }
     {
-      currentsystemparams /GenericResourceDir get (CIDFSubst/) concatstrings
+      (/usr/share/fonts/truetype/droid/)
     } ifelse
   } ifelse