Re: Re: texfont and type-tmf.dat

[George White <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>]

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Patrick Gundlach wrote:

> [...]
> According to to the statements from Walter Schmidt, a TeX font expert
> (perhaps I should say *the* TeX font expert?) in
> http://tug.daimi.au.dk/archives/tex-fonts/msg01328.html
> 
> \quote{% ....
> Note, however, that embedding of URW's fonts, while using the 
> (PSNFSS) Adobe Base35 metrics, will _not_ lead to any bugs!  
> The character metrics are matching!  Differences in the 
> "character bounding boxes" are irrelevant for the advance widths!  
> The only drawback is, that you cannot access those glyphs that 
> are in the URW fonts, but not in the Adobe fonts.  Indeed, this 
> could be overcome by providing particular metrics and VFs for 
> the URW fonts -- see below. }

Hans has demonstated that even the Adobe fonts don't have the same
metrics.  It should also be noted that in practice, if you don't embed
fonts, you will often get font substitutions in the PS rasterizer (e.g.,
ghostscript defaults will use URW fonts where the file requests a Base35
font, current acrobat reader will use Arial where the file requests
Helvetica, some printers with clone interpreters (many recent HP models)
use "clone" fonts. 

There are several versions of the URW fonts in use now: two ghostscript
versions, and a number of versions with additional glyphs distributed
with linux (and I am told that the software used to create the recent
versions may have tampered with the metrics for glyphs that were not
changed).

If you embed the URW fonts using the original URW names it is clear which
fonts are to be used.  This discourages people from "optimizing" your
files by stripping out the fonts.  For archival EPS figures it makes sense
to go further and replace fonts with outline paths.  In this way the
figures should remain useful even after the fonts are no longer supported
by the available rasterizers. 

--
George White <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca> <gnw3@acm.org>
189 Parklea Dr., Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia  B3Z 2G6