[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Bug#496070: marked as done (please provide truetype flavors of the ghostscript fonts)

Your message dated Tue, 27 Aug 2013 07:35:20 +0200
with message-id <1377581720.22939.32.camel@kff50>
and subject line Re: Bug#496070: [ghostscript] opentypefont
has caused the Debian Bug report #496070,
regarding please provide truetype flavors of the ghostscript fonts
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

(NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this
message is talking about, this may indicate a serious mail system
misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact owner@bugs.debian.org
immediately.)


-- 
496070: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=496070
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact owner@bugs.debian.org with problems
--- Begin Message --- 
Package: gsfonts
Version: 1:8.11+urwcyr1.0.7~pre44-3
Severity: wishlist

Dear ghostscript maintainers,
I don't know if this request belongs to ghostscript, gsfonts or gsfonts-x11 but I believe this is the right package since it contains the original fonts.
I'd like to ask you to provide truetype flavours of all fonts contained in the gsfonts package. The conversion is possible with a simple script, since fontforge is able to read .pfb files and save them in .ttf format.
I don't now, however, if or how this will collide with the fonts provided by the gsfonts-x11 package. Moreover I don't know if the fonts in the original ghostscript upstream tarball are to be preferred over the fonts provided by gsfonts? 

Thank you very much!

Cheers,
Fabian

--
Dipl.-Phys. Fabian Greffrath

Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Lehrstuhl für Energieanlagen und Energieprozesstechnik (LEAT)
Universitätsstr. 150, IB 3/134
D-44780 Bochum

Telefon: +49 (0)234 / 32-26334
Fax:     +49 (0)234 / 32-14227
E-Mail:  greffrath@leat.ruhr-uni-bochum.de

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
Dear Jonas,

thank you very much for your (admittedly late) reply.

Am Montag, den 26.08.2013, 18:51 +0200 schrieb Jonas Smedegaard: 
> Converting from Type 1 to TrueType is - as I understand it - never 
> lossless, so essentially introduces a new font, which feels wrong IMO.

You are right, and converting the fonts into Truetype format isn't any
longer an issue to me (thus closing the bug). Meanwhile, I have already
found out about the texgyre fonts and they are exactly what I was
looking for, i.e. a maintained set of the 35 base fonts converted into a
format better suitable for display view.

> As of today fonts-texgyre "loses" to gsfonts as provider of "serif". 
> Bug#720953 covers that, including a fix you can try locally and see if 
> indeed that improves the situation.

For Helvetica, texgyre wins over gsfonts - at least on my system. As a
matter of fact, I have created that fontconfig file that the quoted bug
is about, c.f. #616419, and tested it on my system.

That said, I think the 35 ghostscript core fonts being only available in
Type 1 format isn't a problem anymore with fonts-texgyre available.
However, there is another issue with these fonts and I'd like to take
this opportunity to discuss this with you as the current ghostscript
maintainer (we should drop the debian bug from recipients in the course
of this):

There are three slightly different versions of these fonts installed on
a Debian system:
1) gsfonts
2) ghostscript [*]
3) texlive-fonts-recommended

The gsfonts package contains a fork of the fonts shipped with an earlier
version of ghostscript which was extended with cyrilic glyphs. There
are, however, claims that the latin range has also been
(unintentionally) touched as well. The texlive-fonts-recommended package
thus contains the pristine fonts from the ghostscript release that the
fonts in the gsfonts package were based on. Finally, the ghostscript
package for a long time also carried the cyrilic fork of the fonts -
though a different version than the one in the gsfonts package - and
reverted back to the original fonts as supplied by URW in the 9.05
release. For the recent 9.09 release the fonts have been updated by a
new release of original supplier URW (e.g. fixing the width of one glyph
that had to be patched in the texlive set before).

The drawback is that ghostscript does not ship the complete set of
fonts. They do only ship the .pfb files and are leaving out the .afm
metric files that are useless for ghostscript, but necessary for
everything else. Fortunately, they are distributing the complete set in
http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/fonts/ .

My idea is to package this set of fonts in a fonts-ghostscript package,
make ghostscript and texlive-fonts-recommended depend on it, turn
gsfonts (and gsfonts-x11, while we are at it) into dummy packages
depending on it and providing symlinks. So all users of these fonts
could benefit from the latest upstream improvements and would not need
to carry around their own slightly modified fork of the fonts. What do
you think about it?

- Fabian


[*] Please note that the fonts shiped
in /usr/share/ghostscript/9.05/Resource/Font in the libgs9-common
package are not even used at all and could get safely removed. Instead,
they are mapped to the fonts in the gsfonts package by means of
the /etc/ghostscript/fontmap.d/10gsfonts.conf file.

--- End Message ---
Reply to: