[Fontinst] PSNFSS for URW fonts?

[Walter Schmidt]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2003 03:58:49 +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>
>What about the following idea?
>
>Leave the base fonts as they are (metrics for Adobe fonts, no font
>downloading) and provide support for URW fonts, ie. upalatino.sty,
>utimes.sty... which uses URW metrics and forces downloading of the
>fonts.
>[...]
>A URW font package could support all the glyphs provided by URW.
>There are /Euro symbols in each text font that are not present in
>Adobe fonts.  And because the fonts are downloaded and cannot be
>replaced, adding faked glyphs is quite reliable.

In theory, this is perfectly correct.
In practice, there are, however, two obstacles:

(1) 

URW Nimbus Sans has a broken germandbls (ß) and is not 
acceptable for German users.  Of course, when it is used
as a Helvetica substitute this applies as well, but you 
can still obtain the real Helvetica fonts for free (sic!)
and use these.  Many quality-aware German TeX users are
going this way.   As long as the ß in Nimbus Sans gets is 
not fixed, I refuse to support it "officially" within 
PSNFSS.

(2)

You can confuse Ghostscriot by embedding URW fonts into 
a PostScript file.  Imagine the following situation:
A document is using Nimbus Roman as the text font, and
an included EPC picture needs Times Roman.  Of course,
 Times is not embedded in the EPS.)  This situation is 
very common.  Dvips will embed Nimbus Roman into the 
generated .ps.  As far as subsetting is concerned, dvips 
will honor only the characters, that are used in the 
document text, but not thiose that are used only on the
picture.   When Ghostsvcript comes to render the picture, 
it finds the embedded (subset of) Nimbus Roman, and will 
use it as a replacement for Times.  However, those 
characters that are use only in the picture but not in the 
main text are missing then.

I know that that are some people working on an improved set
of the Base35 fonts, which will be derived from the URW 
fonts.  It will have a correct germandbl, and it will have 
different FontNames, so that problem #2 cannot happen.  
I intend to build an improved PSNFSS on _these_  fonts once 
they are finished.  Maybe I can tell you more after the 
DANTE meeting.  


Greetings
Walter