Re: changig fonts used by gs

[Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@physik.uni-erlangen.de>]

Frank Küster wrote:
> Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@web.de> wrote:
> 
>> I have made a slightly imporved version of the hints file and written a
>> bit of documentation for it. See
>> <URL:http://www.tfkp.physik.uni-erlangen.de/~ralf/debian/>
> 
> The text sounds good and understandable.  
> 
>> If anybody wants to test the procedure, I woold be interested in the
>> results.
> 
> Nice!

2 x 'good to hear'

>> Anyway, question is if I should simply make a web page from this
>> (perhaps with 'before' and 'after' screen shots :-), or if it is added
>> to the documentation in tetex-bin or tetex-extra (or tex-common, if I
>> rewrite it to refer to fonts in teTeX or TeX Live). For sarge users not
>> using the teTeX 3 backports are web oage might be good, anyway.
> 
> If you create a directory with html files and screenshots, we can
> include it in the package, and we can also have it somewhere on the
> net. 

Ok, I will try to find a free time-slot somewhen soon.

> I think it would be fair to extend that sentence:
> 
> ,----
> | These fonts are an earlier version
> | of the fonts provided by the gsfonts package. The latter fonts are
> | still in development and therefore sometimes cause problems.
> `----
> 
> with some nice explanation of the advantages of the gsfonts' version (I
> don't know any, but there must be some).

Sounds reasonable. The main advantage of the fonts in gsfonts is that
they contain cyrillic glyphs. Recent upstream versions even contain
vietnames glyphs from the vntex project. However, I think one can't use
them in PS file without including the font anyway, which is why the
hints file takes over the PostScript names like Times-Roman but leaves
the names from URW untoched. I will try to expand on this and probably
add a reference to the scalable-cyrfonts-tex package, which makes yet
another version of these fonts available for TeX. The maintainer of that
package seems to have knowledge of fonts and changed the internal names
of the fonts, which is a very good idea, indeed.

> In the case that the gs packages get fixed and start relying on the font
> configuration provided by defoma, we could even add a debconf question
> whether we should do this change in our maintainer scripts. 

Sounds interesting.

cheerio
ralf