problems with cm fonts -- action requested by knuth

K. Berry twg-tds@tug.cs.umb.edu
Mon, 11 Nov 1996 10:21:52 -0500


    P.S.  The TDS standard explicitely mentions the problem of unique
    filenames for MF sources files with a reference to modified CM fonts.
    If it turns out that these fonts are illegal because of the violation
    of Knuth's copyright, does this mean that the relevant section in the
    TDS draft should be revised accordingly?

This is referring to roman.mf, punct.mf, etc.

I don't believe it is actually illegal to distribute a modified
roman.mf, just a very bad idea.

The TDS now says the following.  Does it need to be changed?  I don't
see anything to do, offhand.


\item Names of \MF{} input files (as opposed to bitmaps) must be unique
within all of \path|texmf/fonts|. In practice, this is a problem with
some variants of Computer Modern which contain slightly modified files
named \path|punct.mf|, \path|romanl.mf|, and so on. We believe the only
feasible solution is to rename the derivative files to be
unique.