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