[pdftex] Adobe Times instead of Nimbus fonts

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 4 May 2006, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>>>>>> "gnwiii" == gnwiii  <gnwiii at gmail.com> writes:
>
>  > Your old trusty real Adobe Times may lack a Euro glyph as well as
>  > Cyrillic, etc. that the URW fonts provide.
>
> No, the URW fonts do not provide Cyrillc.  See
>
>    fonts/afm/urw/times/utmr8a.afm
>
> There is an extended version in the Ghostscript distribution where
> someone added cyrillic glyphs.  Unfortunately he did not rename the
> fonts files and did not change /FontName.  Even worse, he did not
> change the /UniqueID.  Though this is permitted by the GPL, it was a
> bad idea.

I was bitten by this last month.  In fact the fonts in the AFPL 
Ghostscript distribution (at least in the Windows installer and at 
http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/ghostscript/AFPL/fonts/) are the 
original versions without cyrillic.  Linux distros tend to have a package 
called urw-fonts and be set up to use that rather than the Ghostscript 
fonts: the GPLed versions of ghostscript come with a different version 
comtaining cyrillic.

So what got me was a Linux user assuming his ghostscript fonts were 
available to all ghostscript users.  (I use Linux, but have AFPL 
ghostscript installed from the sources.)

> Though I appreciate adding cyrillic, with /FontName and /UniqueID
> unchanged the fonts are to be regarded as beeing broken.

This forces you to embed the fonts if you want to use cyrillic, but
that is a good idea since URW fonts should not be assumed in most 
environments.

> The fonts on CTAN are the original ones as provided by URW and
> maintained by Walter Schmidt.  Maintenance here means to make sure
> that people get the original fonts with the reqired tfm and vf files.
>
> The Adobe fonts and the URW fonts are not identical.

Not even their dimensions are (as given by the .afm files).

[...]

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595