Re: Fleurons

[Staszek Wawrykiewicz <staw@gust.org.pl>]

On Tue, 31 May 2005, Karl Berry wrote:

>     this differes per year; i keep changing these names and always lag
>     behind one tex live version
>      
> TL has always distributed both pzdr.tfm and uzdr.tfm.  I don't have an
> easy way to check the situation in teTeX.

teTeX has only pzdr.tfm. See below for reasons.
 
>     one of the previous tex lives someone moved the urw's to some 35vf
>     folder, after that things went bad (got lost and such); i discussed
>     this with Staszek and he reverted it;
> 
> Starting in TL 2003, uzdr.tfm was indeed put under urw35vf instead of
> just urw.  I do not know/remember why, or who did it (though we could
> check the logs), or what "got lost" as a result.  It is also still the
> case in the current sources, so I also don't know what you mean by
> Staszek "reverted it".  Staszek, what did you do?

I can explain it once again. In 2003 all that urw mess was hopefully
cleaned on CTAN and then on TL. Discussion started on 6 june and on 
24 july that's me, who cleaned it for TL. The *base* 35 urw fonts (only
afm and pfm/pfb) were prepared *after* all that urw tfm, vf etc. support
files were made.

>From README.base35
  TeX systems can use these fonts as drop-in replacements for
  Adobe's PostScript Base fonts, which are not free.  No
  particular TeX metrics, virtual fonts or macro files are
  provided for URW's base fonts.  They are to be used with the
  same support files as Adobe's originals, i.e., with the
  files of the PSNFSS collection.

  AFM and PFM files are supplied here for the sake of
  completeness only.  They are normally not required for use
  with TeX.

In fact, nobody knows how the *old* mess with tfm, vf etc. fits
to more *new* urw pfb which are of better quality then the older ones. 
Anyway both distributions cannot be mixed. Not to say about packaging, etc.
So I introduced "urw35vf" (#3416) which contains all (historical) stuff
for those using urw fonts directly (.vf, .tfm, .fd, .sty files).
Everybody has freedom using them from TL. Thomas removed such stuff
from teTeX as simply garbage.

> Meanwhile, the afm and pfb are under just urw/.  It seems odd, though I
> can imagine how it could happen.

??? Everything is OK: fonts/afm/urw/ and fonts/type1/urw/

> Clearly the URW fonts are not 100% identical to the Adobe fonts, but in
> practice we have to accept the URW Type 1's under the p* names, because
> the p* names are what most documents have historically used.  We can't
> suddenly make those documents unusable, that would be disastrous.
 
> For that matter, the Adobe fonts themselves have changed over the
> years.  Nothing is perfect.

Right.
 
>     but context (users) expect the whole set of urw (afm & pfb) to be
>     present because they generate other encodings and such;
> 
> uzdr.afm and uzdr.pfb are both in the current TL sources, and always
> have been.  I know of no reason or suggestion to delete them.

They are as well present in teTeX. 

>   i think that we need to get rid of the urw mappings in the aliases file
> 
> I agree.  I have now deleted the aliases file altogether from the TL
> sources.  We'll see how that flies.  I don't know if that will change
> anything wrt gwTeX, though.

Ahh, I see! aliases could cause problems. Thanks for deleting that file.

Best,

-- 
Staszek Wawrykiewicz
StaW@gust.org.pl