Re: texfont and type-tmf.dat

[Patrick Gundlach <pg@levana.de>]

Hi,

George White <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca> writes:

> Hans has demonstated that even the Adobe fonts don't have the same
> metrics.  

Which fonts, which characters and which metrics. Please be more
specific, since it might not even touch the way TeX handles fonts.
I am not sure what is taken to create the tfms, but I think it is the
advance width (WX) of each glyph. Who cares about the bb?

> It should also be noted that in practice, if you don't embed fonts,

I am not discussing about embedding. That is a totally different
topic (not really totally different...)

> 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.

I agree that fonts should be embedded.

> 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

right, but there is only one version of the urw fonts shipped with
TeX. And there are only one version of tfms shipped with TeX: the
psnfss ones.

> (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).

this is very vague. 

> 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.  

Right. Fonts refererenced by eps files can cause serious headaches.

> In this way the figures should remain useful even after the fonts
> are no longer supported by the available rasterizers.

100% agree.

But what does it mean for the font metrics? 

Patrick
-- 
You are your own rainbow!