[tex-live] Missing Ligatures after 'dvips -Ppdf'

[Robin Fairbairns]

Uwe Siart <uwe.siart at tum.de> wrote:

> in recent texlive with kpfonts v3.02 all ff-Ligatures are missing in the
> .ps output when the 'Ppdf' option is used with dvips. A minimal example
> to reproduce the defect is
> 
> % ---------------------------
> \documentclass{scrartcl}
> \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
> \usepackage{kpfonts}
> \begin{document}
>   Koffer
> \end{document}
> % ---------------------------
> 
> It appears that this is due to character shifting enabled in config.pdf
> (option "G"). Comparison to MiKTeX shows that this option has been
> disabled there hence the problem does not appear in MiKTeX.
> 
> I'm unable to assess whether this is an issue with kpfonts 3.02 or
> whether character shifting is (in general) a risky action which should
> be avoided at all. Therefore I'd like to encourage you to check whether
> texlive should follow MiKTeX's modality and disable character shifting
> in config.pdf.

character-shifting deals with a problem in acrobat 3 (i think it was).
it has never been safe when used with an adobe-standard-encoded type 1,
and one might expect it to be far worse than "just" broken "f" ligatures
with a font family as complicated as kpfonts.

one might even think one could do away with it in all standard configs,
but there could be screams from the "we must continue to support people
running dos 2 on an 80186" people.

however, there's still the "D 8000" in the config, which aims to achieve
dvipsone's sort of glyph placement accuracy.  perhaps we could have a
config.hires that contains nothing but that?

r