[tex-live] getnonfreefonts

[Joel C. Salomon]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 1:06 PM, Paulo Ney de Souza <pauloney at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 12:07 AM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>
 wrote:
> > > Why is "getnonfreefonts" not a part of TeXLive?
> >
> > Because it is about non-free fonts, which is out of the
> > policy of TeX Live.
>
> Understood ... so here goes my real question:
>
> There is a huge collection of TeX-ready fonts out there (on CTAN and
> elsewhere) which are not available on TL. This is vexing because the
> technology to make these installs a single command line like ...
>
>     font-install Antiqua
>
> has been in place for over 2 decades now, but we keep on insisting that all
> users make this installs by hand in an extremely cumbersome and rarely
> intelligible sequence of commands and edits... making it one of the darkest
> corners of TeXLive.
>
> "getnonfreefonts" offers 99% of the infrastructure needed for the job, it is
> just a tiny bit that is needed to complete it.
>
> What would be the preferred direction: To have these natively in TL or
> installable via a script?

TLContrib, <http://tlcontrib.metatex.org/>, is a TeX Live-compatible
repository from where packages not accepted to TeX Live can be easily
downloaded. I don’t know how well-maintained it still is, but it
suffices as a proof-of-concept.

—Joel C. Salomon