[tex-live] Removed mathtime fonts -> missing metrics for belleek

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Fri May 25 16:21:11 CEST 2007


On 5/24/07, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:

> I find the belleek/mathtime situation completely confusing and
> confused.  I do not know what to do.
>
> Obviously, the goal for TL is to support belleek.  Unfortunately, I was
> told most of the metrics and packages are for mathtime and did not work
> for belleek.  That's why I took them out.

For the sake of transparency, it would be better to have a belleek package
independent of mathtime, but someone would have to write it, and I'm not
sure enough people would benefit to make it worth the effort.

There are a couple reasons to use belleek fonts.

1) someone ends up with sources of a document that uses mathtime.
While it is convenient that they can format the document without the
real fonts, it may also be confusing since they don't realize that
they aren't using the same fonts.
In practice, many documents written using mathtime use a few glyphs
from mathtime pro, so can't be formatted using belleek anyway.

2) someone is preparing a document that requires Times for the body
font and they want a compatible math font.  There are several
alternatives (both free and commercial) discussed at
<http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=psfchoice>

STIX is promising release "real soon now" (TM) and has also said they will
have TeX support.

> A thorough review of the situation would be very helpful, so that we can
> properly support belleek in TL.
>
> > What is the license status of these metrics?
>
> I do not know if we ever actually had a good license statement for these
> metrics (or lots of others).
>
> > times-like math in Plain TeX
>
> Another alternative is to do whatever is done by the latex mathptmx
> package, although I imagine the result is less complete than belleek.

I think mathptmx provides more glyphs, but this was achieved at the
expense of consistency.   Mathptmx would indeed be the place to start
if someone wanted to produce a belleek package.

http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/info/Free_Math_Font_Survey/survey.html
lets you view belleek and mathptmx together.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


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