TeX fonts, part one [Was: Re: [Fedora-packaging] Proposed amendment to general packaging guidelines: no bundling of fonts in other packages]

[Nicolas Mailhot]

On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 23:18 +0300, Vasile Gaburici wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 10:50 PM, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
> > 2008/7/25 Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com>:
> > I second the idea that TeX ought to be an exception to the guideline
> > "not hide general-purpose fonts in app-specific directories"; TeX
> > predates all other programs in a GNU/Linux system, and TeX users have
> > hardended expectations about how it works; if Fedora's TeX package
> > fiddles with things, that will be a loss for users.
> 
> If Fedora ships a screwed-up TeX, it would incur a loss of users,
> mostly of PAYING academic ones that buy RHEL through their
> departments, like UMD's CS dept., which just finished a big upgrade of
> all the CS RHEL machines... 

Oh, please, I heard the same bogus arguments from Java people when we
started integrating Java under Linux at JPackage. I was not the "Java
way" (the "Java way" being whatever screwed up setup SUN historically
used). There would be a loss of users. Etc, etc

A few year forward SUN was quoting JPackage in all its Linux press
releases and trying to catch up with us.

There is no reason to fear changes when those changes are sound
engineering.

> Back to the technical side, a font for TeX requires a tfm file (TeX
> font metrics). To use it with LaTeX you also need a fd file, an
> sometimes a sty with macros is provided, especially if the font has
> features. These files don't really belong the the system fonts
> directory because nothing but TeX can use them...

And thus TEX can keep them. But the common resources (OpenType fonts),
it gets to share them with the rest of the system, which means
installation in system dirs.

> What I would like to see system fonts installing themselves for TeX
> use, say via an autoinst postinst script.

You're welcome to propose amendments to our current font packaging
policy. We have no TEX rules right now because no TEX user was
interested in writing them and other people obviously couldn't.

The main requirements are:
1. The font specs must be kept simple (ie no complex in-spec scripting)
2. A font package can not require any specific font system on install.
It's only allowed to use one if already present, and it's the font
system responsability to discover resources that were installed before
it was on system.

(same proposal to bitmap users that complain of anti-bitmap ostracism)

> Like I said my "draft"
> email, that's a lot of hassle for the users to do manually. That's why
> I'm trying to get fontools resurected...
> 
> Also, the current texlive package has inconsistent rules for font
> formats. The Gyre fonts are included as OTF, while the LM (Latin
> Modern) are not, even though XeTeX needs them that way if you wan to
> select them as non-default fonts. I suspect this didn't originate from
> upstream.

I can't comment on this part. For me they're all wrong.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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