[tex-live] Supportfiles for affordable Fontsite fonts - why not on CTAN?

[Robin Fairbairns]

[snipped league at contrapunctus.net, since i don't know what they are, and
don't want to offend.]

Wolfgang Keller <feliphil at gmx.net> wrote:

> From Fontsite, you can get e.g. a Bembo (Bergamo), Garamond, Sabon
> (Savoy), Futura (Function), Optima (Opus), all with small caps,
> oldstyle figures, and many others more...
> 
> ...for ~15$ each (!). For a complete family.
> 
> Is there anything wrong with these fonts that an amateur like me can't
> spot from the PDF samples?

there used to be a fontsite 500 disc you could buy, for an even sillier
price.  istr there was a set of metrics for the fonts on that disc, but
that was long ago and i can't find any reference to it now, though your
link may refer to the same thing.

fontsite-garamond appears in the mathdesign bundle, fwiw.

in general people seem to consider that fonts at these sorts of prices
*must* be ripoffs.  i have never bought any of them, and shan't now, so
close to retirement.

if the fonts are "morally" ok, i don't know of any particular rationale
for there being no metrics, etc. ... except it would take a fair bit of
work, and people tend not to do such things unless they have their own
need for them.

(walter schmidt used to create support files a propos of i know not
what, but he seems to have vanished below some event horizon -- i had
heard he was involved in the stix black hole, which would explain it...)

if the creators of support files don't submit them to ctan, ctan won't
offer them.  of course, mailing the tex-live list seems eccentric, since
tex-live won't hold free support files for commercial products, even.

Robin Fairbairns

For the CTAN team