Re: lmodern fonts and sarge

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

Hello,

For your information, a new lmodern package was uploaded today that adds
defoma support for all lm*10 fonts. From the same source package, I also
generated a new binary package, lmodern-x11, that makes the fonts
available to X (the point in having a separate package is to avoid the
dependency on xutils for people who want the fonts but don't care if X
cannot see them directly---*some* X apps can still use them without
lmodern-x11: the ones that directly or indirectly use defoma---; I think
this is the reason why gsfonts and gsfonts-x11 are separate packages,
too).

I've put screenshots of X apps using some of these fonts at the
following URL for those who wonder how for instance Emacs looks like
with lmtti10. ;-)

  http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/tmp/lmodern-screenshots/

If you are careful, you will notice that gtkfontsel (which uses
GTK+ 1.2, not GTK+ 2) missed the Small Caps variants in :

  http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/tmp/lmodern-screenshots/gtkfontsel.png

It seems it (presumably GTK+ 1.2) is not clever enough to do the right
thing when it encounters XLFD font names with a non-empty ADD_STYLE_NAME
field (i.e., the "small caps" in
-unregistered-Latin Modern Roman-medium-o-normal-small caps-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1).

But as you can see with xfontsel on :

  http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/tmp/lmodern-screenshots/xfontsel-lmcsco10.png

the font can be found under the right name.

Currently, I only declared the ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 charsets to
defoma and X for these fonts, because I am sure they support these
charsets well. However, I think they also support other charsets such as
ISO-8859-2, but I cannot say for sure (I am not familiar with ISO-8859-x
charsets where x != 1 and x != 15). I mailed the author of the fonts
whose address is in the upstream sort-of-README, Bogus\l{}aw Jackowski,
to obtain more info on this point but didn't get a reply yet. If you do
know that these fonts are OK for other charsets, please tell me so that
I declare these charsets as well.

As there is a new binary package (lmodern-x11) in this upload (0.86-8),
all this will probably need a week or so before entering the archive. In
the meantime, you can find my packages here:

  deb http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/debian sid/binary-all/
  deb-src http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/debian sid/source/

(there is also a binary-$(ARCH)/ directory but it is not needed for
lmodern*)

Thanks for your attention.


Notes:

  1. The fonts screen rendering on the X screenshots is not the most
     pleasing I've ever seen (it seems there is no anti-aliasing at all)
     but I've read it's a known problem in XFree86 (poor rendering of
     Type 1 fonts). Perhaps it can be configured for better rendering, I
     don't know. Perhaps it will be improved in a future release...

  2. lmodern-x11 does not contain any file that can clash with tetex
     files, so lmodern-x11 won't cause any problem when tetex
     incorporates the lmodern fonts.

-- 
Florent