[Mac OS X TeX] The new TeX package

[William Adams]

Piet said:
>> I would also like to make a plea for the inclusion of the CM-Super
font
>> set. It contains (amongst others) Type 1 fonts for the EC and TC
fonts,
>> which are highle needed in MacOSX where PDF is the preferred output
>> format.
>> At least in most european languages. It also contains Type 1 fonts
for
>> Cyrillic.
<snip>

and Gerben replied:
>Just tell me where to get it and I'll have a look at it.

Here's the initial announcement of the CM-Super fonts made to the
TeX-Fonts mailing list. It's been up-dated a couple of times since this,
and is a very laudable work (though I'd be more interested in getting
the QuickDraw/GX like version of Computer Modern which was done for
TeX/GX up and running---this'd get us access to HoeflerText,
AppleChancery, Skia and Zapfino)

I think the fonts below have gotten to CTAN.

---------------announcement---------------------------------------
The CM-Super package could be freely downloaded from
ftp://ftp.vsu.ru/pub/tex/font-packs/cm-super/
(see below for details).

This is the first public release of these fonts, so we welcome
comments and bug reports.

Best,
v.

=========================================================================

                     CM-Super font package
                     version 0.1 (September 18, 2001)

Copyright (c) 2001 Vladimir Volovich <vvv at vsu.ru>.
See the file PUBLIC (Aladdin Free Public License) for license
conditions.
As a special exception, permission is granted to include these font
programs in a Postscript or PDF file that consists of a document that
contains text to be displayed or printed using these fonts, regardless
of the conditions or license applying to the document itself.

The CM-super package contains type1 fonts converted from METAFONT
fonts and covers entire EC/TC and LH fonts (Computer Modern font
families). All european and cyrillic writings are covered. Each Type1
font program contains ALL glyphs from the following encodings: T1,
TS1, T2A, T2B, T2C, X2, and also Adobe StandardEncoding (582 glyphs
per non-SC font and 465 glyphs per SC font), and could be reencoded to
any of these encodings using standard dvips or pdftex facilities (the
corresponding support files are also included).

I.e., these type1 fonts could be used as an immediate replacement for
LaTeX's EC, TC, and LH fonts to create Postscript and PDF documents
with vector fonts (i.e. no changes to your LaTeX documents are
required to use these fonts once you have them installed). You could
also prepare EPS or PDF illustrations in your favorite applications
with texts written using these fonts, and then include them in your
LaTeX documents. These fonts could be used not only in TeX-related
applications, but also as all other Type1 text fonts, e.g. in Windows
(and you will be able to typeset multilingual texts using them).

Font file names correspond to the scheme used in EC fonts, with the
first two letters "sf" ("super font") instead of "ec".

E.g., sfrm1000.pfb contains all glyphs from:
ecrm1000, tcrm1000, larm1000, lbrm1000, lcrm1000, rxrm1000.

Fonts were created with using textrace (based on autotrace and
Ghostscript), t1utils and a bunch of Perl scripts, and were optimized
and hinted using FontLab 3.1 provided by FontLab Ltd. The set of
UniqueID values was registered at Adobe.

It appears that careless approach to FontLab's optimisation and
auto-hinting facilities could lead to loss of quality of the original
font (some glyph shapes could be broken), so we used the most precise
optimisation, and hope that optimised and hinted fonts are indeed
better than original traced fonts (also, they are significantly
smaller in size). So far, we did not find any bugs in optimized fonts.

Note that a small number of (fortunately, rately used) fonts are not
included yet because of the bugs in EC font drivers which prevented
their generation. We plan to provide these missing fonts soon.
(Currently there are 376 Type1 font files here, of total 401.)

The CM-Super package could be freely downloaded from
ftp://ftp.vsu.ru/pub/tex/font-packs/cm-super/
(and soon from CTAN)
(see also ftp://ftp.vsu.ru/pub/tex/README for a list of mirrors)
The size of the entire package is about 54Mb.

To install this package in teTeX or TeX Live systems, copy all type1
fonts (*.pfb files) to .../texmf/fonts/type1/public/cm-super/
directory and install the MAP (*.map) and ENC (*.enc) files to their
usual place (e.g. under .../texms/dvips/cm-super/), and instruct dvips
and pdftex to use these MAP files (e.g. using the "updmap" script).
Do not forget to update the texmf filename database (run mktexlsr).

Although this package is provided AS IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY (as
explained in the file PUBLIC), we request your comments and bug
reports which should be sent to the email address given above.

Happy TeXing!

TODO:

* provide AFM and INF files
* provide optimized but not hinted version (will be smaller)?
* include glyphs from TS1 encoding into SC fonts? (useful for non-TeX
applications)
* add glyphs from T2D encoding
* add all other glyphs from LH fonts
* full support for unicode cyrillic codepage
* include glyphs from cbgreek ec-like fonts
* add CM Concrete family



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