Another comment on texlive-20000413.iso: Drop text1!
Kaja P. Christiansen
kaja@daimi.au.dk
Wed, 10 May 2000 14:54:02 +0200 (MET DST)
Jörg Knappen writes:
> this is a rather serious request:
>
> Please keep the macro package text1 out of the distribution.
>
> It is a rarely used and rather dead macro package. It comes with
> additional fonts named "cm*" (eg. cmr11) which are buggy (The design
> size claimed by the METAFONT sources is inconsistent with the x_height
> of the fonts, instead of "14pt" it should be "14.4pt" etc.). The
> text1 cm fonts have caused much of confusion in the past and they will
> continue to do so.
The fonts do occasionally cause confusion (also at our site!), but they
are not buggy. Last year, I asked Barbara Beeton about the design size
adopted for text1 fonts and she answered that
| the design sizes of the text1
| fonts are intentional. knuth *recommended*, but didn't *require*
| that the magstep progression be used. the tex group at washington
| state university developed the text1 collection, using "real" rather
| than scaled design sizes. they aren't corrupted; they just don't
| follow the scheme expected by many (most?) tex users.
> Note, that the Sauter package can generate fonts with the same names,
> but different metrics than the text1 package does.
True, yet the text1 font names appear perfectly legal (according to the
documentation, the author asked Knuth for permission to use cm* names).
So, my suggestion is to make a comment on the text1 design sizes somewhere
where it would be easily seen (Catalogue?) and thus avoid the confusion.
Regards
Kaja