Bug#459539: texlive-lang-cyrillic: Really large cyrillic fonts unavailable
On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 18:33 +0300, =?UTF-8?Q? =D0=90=D0=BD=D0=B4=D1=80=D0=B5=D0=B9_?= =?UTF-8?Q?=D0=9F=D0=B0=D1=80=D0=B0=D0=BC=D0=BE=D0=BD=D0=BE=D0=B2 ?= wrote:
> Actually, it just loads times.sty package, which changes the default fonts to
> Times, Helvetica, Courier.
>
> According to
>
> $ aptitude show texlive-lang-cyrillic
>
> this Debian package includes timescyr LaTeX package, which should do
> the trick of providing proper font metrics for cyrillic variants of
> Times, Helvetica, Courier. But in reality it does not provide needed
> metrics for extra large sizes.
No, that's not the problem, but the full story is rather complicated.
The times package, which BTW is deprecated, switches the roman font to
family 'ptm' (=Adobe Times), the sans serif font to 'phv' (=Adobe
Helvetica) and the tt font to 'pcr' (=Adobe Courier). The reason why
Adobe is used instead of any other font vendor is because times.sty
comes from the PSNFSS package that tries to support the fonts build
into PostScript printers, which used to be those from Adobe. Current
TeX actually systems use the variants supplied by URW instead.
Anyway, if you typeset a latin text with times.sty, then ptm/phv/pcr
are used in OT1 or T1 encoding. This works, since this are the
encodings supported by PSNFSS. If, however, you typeset a cyrillic
text, (typically) the font encoding T2A is used. There are no metrics
for ptm/phv/pcr in T2A encoding, hence the fallback cmr is used. This
is problematic in this case, since cmr needs special attention when
using large sizes, since it has different design sizes and the original
version is a bitmap font.
Now what does the timescyr package do? From my point of view, it is a
pretty useless package since it provides only support for the fonr
family 'mnt' (=Monotype Times New Roman) in the old OT2 encoding. And
since Monotype Times New Roamn is not free, the font is not included.
Hence you can use this together with TeX, but not with pdfTeX or any
dvi driver (dvips, xdvi, ...), since the latter require the actual
font files.
Have you tried the fonts from scalable-cyrfonts-tex? I haven't checked
which font families are supplied here, but I would be surprised if it
where not possible to fix this issue with the fonts from this
package. In that case I would suggest adding a Recommends/Suggests to
texlive-lang-cyrillic pointing at scalable-cyrfonts-tex.
cheerio
ralf
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