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Bug#721521: [Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#721521: ITP: fonts-urw-base35 -- Set of the 35 PostScript Language Level 2 Base Fonts



Quoting Fabian Greffrath (2013-09-03 21:35:11)
> Am Dienstag, den 03.09.2013, 20:06 +0200 schrieb Jonas Smedegaard: 
> > Why?  Sounds like a _very_ bad idea to me (no matter if others did 
> > similar bad stuff in the past).
> 
> Because the font names may be hard coded somewhere (the internal 
> FontName and FontFamily fields, I am not talking about the file 
> names).
> 
> This is how it looks for the current gsfonts package:
> 
> ~/Debian/gsfonts-8.11+urwcyr1.0.7~pre44$ grep -a 'FontName' *.pfb
> a010013l.pfb:/FontName /URWGothicL-Book def
> a010015l.pfb:/FontName /URWGothicL-Demi def
> a010033l.pfb:/FontName /URWGothicL-BookObli def
[snip]
> These are the values those fields carry since decades. Now, for the 
> updated release, URW decided to slightly modify those fields:
> 
> ~/Debian/fonts-urw-base35$ grep -a 'FontName' *.pfb
> a010013l.pfb:/FontName /URWGothic-Boo def
> a010015l.pfb:/FontName /URWGothic-Dem def
> a010033l.pfb:/FontName /URWGothic-BooObl def
[snip]
> 
> I am afraid these FontNames are expected and have even found them 
> hard-coded in texlive. Thus, I am considering to reset these fields 
> back to the values of the gsfonts package. Ghostscript has already 
> done this for the fonts in the Resource/Font directory to circumvent 
> that exact issue. They did also rename the font file names, but this 
> is not what I am talking about.

Not all choices made by Ghostscript project are relevant for Debian to 
follow.

Could it be that there is a good reason for the renaming?

Might it affect some uses of the official font that we distort it?  An 
example coming to my mind is Postscript files referencing a font without 
embedding it - produced on a host with the pristine font installed).

Is there perhaps a way to "symlink" old FontName to new one - in TeX 
and/or in fontconfig or other places?

If we "hack" the font, should we then better change some font 
identifiers to ensure our flavor of the font is distinct from the 
pristine one?


To me it seems we have a chance of shipping a commercial grade font in 
its pristine form, and I worry that we ruin that opportunity.

I am no expert in this - I just know from my work at a prepress bureau 
in past millenium that a font is still a font after tumbling it through 
a font editor, but is no longer the same so should then preferrably have 
some ID fields changed so as to avoid clashing with the original.

I can imagine that the World of fonts is already a huge mess, but would 
prefer not making it worse.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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