[tex-live] on cm-super fonts

[Vladimir Volovich]

"WL" == Werner LEMBERG writes:

 >> > could you please send snapshot from Adobe Reader rendering of >
 >> cm-super fonts without and with this fix? if it makes the >
 >> rendering visibly better, i'll apply it to the cm-super fonts.

 WL> Without even looking at the font I (as one of the FreeType
 WL> maintainers) know immediately that hints greatly improve the
 WL> rendering quality of *any* Type 1 font.  Especially blue values are
 WL> important to assure consistent glyph heights and depths.

the fonts were already (auto)hinted (using fontlab), but lacked
BlueValues and OtherBlues in the private dictionary.

i updated the cm-super fonts, and released v0.3.4 which should appear on
ctan tomorrow, and currently is available from ftp.vsu.ru/pub/tex/font-packs/cm-super/

what i did is i first processed the fonts with fontforge, using
simplified script (without auto-hinting etc):

for i in *.pfb ; do
 FILE=`basename $i .pfb`
 if [ ! -f $FILE.afm ]; then break; fi
 fontforge -lang=ff -c "Open(\"$i\");\
 ClearPrivateEntry(\"BlueValues\");\
 ClearPrivateEntry(\"OtherBlues\");\
 SelectWorthOutputting();\
 Generate(\"${FILE}\"+\"-new.pfb\",\"\",0x200021);\
 Close();"
done

which added the BlueValues and OtherBlues. then i extracted them using
t1disasm, and added to the original fonts, again using t1disasm+perl+t1asm.
nothing changed in the fonts except the added BlueValues and OtherBlues.
all hinting, sub-routines, etc remained intact.

as far as i can see, it makes some difference (glyphs heights and depths
became more aligned), which is hopefully for good. :-)

Best,
v.