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

[Robin Fairbairns]

George N. White III <gnwiii at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

so we forget these documents as justification

> 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>

which hasn't been kept up-to-date -- there has been a flood of recent
outline fonts that offer maths support.  i'm not at all sure what to do
about this -- the faq answer is already over-long, but i guess i just
have to plod on in there and extend it.

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

ho ho ho.  they've been promising release "real soon now" as long as
i've been watching their web site.  (an excellent alternative to drying
paint for those calming-down moments.)

sure, it will be nice to see stix with tex support.  but i'm not holding
my breath.

> > 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.

i would regard mathptmx as a guideline rather than a basis: there are
lots of things belleek has that mathptmx substitutes.

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

the differences are small but telling, imo.  i wonder how stix will look
in such company.

robin