Re: wrong URW font directory used by gropdf (was: installed 'gropdf' incorrectly used for compilation)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Deri,

At 2022-10-07T13:23:06+0100, Deri wrote:
> On Friday, 7 October 2022 10:35:55 BST G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > One thing I don't understand is why "(gs)" (which, IIRC, means,
> > "whatever Ghostscript's font search path reported in 'gs -h' is)
> > comes right after the URW fonts directory when searching for Adobe
> > or generic fonts but all the way at the end of the search path for
> > fonts using the 'U' (URW) foundry.
> > 
> > Deri may well have explained this to me before and I have forgotten.
> > If the distinct placement is deliberate, we should add an
> > explanatory comment.
[...]
> So, there may be two sources of URW fonts, the ones which may be
> supplied with ghostscript (remember some versions supply them in %rom%
> which means they are not available to external programs), and as
> separate package generated from URW sources.

...right.  That %rom% thing squirmed completely out of my brain despite
having followed your discussion with Ingo about it only months ago.

> There is no guarantee that the fonts from different sources are the
> same, although the same glyphs will have identical widths. If using
> grops and ghostscript to produce pdfs, you will be using the
> ghostscript supplied fonts, so if you are using gropdf font TR it
> makes sense to use the same font which grops/ghostscript would use.

Reasonable.

> When using U-TR (since you are specifically requesting the URW fonts
> are used) it makes sense to use the URW fonts first. If one of the
> sources is not available the fallback is to use the one which is
> available, in which case the download file would have the same paths
> for both foundries, default and U.

Also reasonable.

> Even if there is only one source for the URW fonts, the difference
> between the default and U foundries is that afmtodit has been run on
> the files found so the U- fonts will contain more glyphs than the
> default fonts copied from the grops directory.

afmtodit has been run on the Adobe fonts too, just...a really long time
ago.  I have looked into fixing Savannah #63018 "the right way"; this
means getting that font/devps/generate stuff to actually work again.

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?63018

I'm attaching the core of the fix, but for it to produce a useful ZD
font description file is going to require un-bitrotting some other
stuff, and building some more powerful machinery to figure out file name
mappings for PostScript fonts to groff font names.  Something font
designers seem to love to do is to change their font file names every
two weeks...

> I hope this explains why it makes sense to reverse the order for the
> two foundries. I'll leave the appropriate comment to you.

Thank you!  I'll ponder over it.  Nothing makes me learn something like
being given the responsibility to explain it.  :P

Regards,
Branden

dingbats.diff
Description: Text Data

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature