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

[Christopher League]

If somebody really wanted to push these Fontsite support files to CTAN, I would cooperate. Just make sure they work for you first with the latest CD (is it even still available?).. because even I don't use them anymore.

Most of the basic families are very usable (New Baskerville definitely an exception), but it took an enormous amount of work to tame them for TeX.. plucking glyphs out of expert sets that don't consistently obey any standard encoding, for example. And with each new edition of the CD the encodings would change!

I think some of the families are now available for separate download, and I have no idea whether these continue to work with the existing support files. It's not something I want to bother with anymore, when XeTeX and professional OTFs work so much better with way less hassle. I got the Adobe Type Classics CD and never looked back.

Chris


On Mar 16, 2010, at 10:25 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> On 16 March 2010 Wolfgang Keller wrote:
> 
>> Is there anything wrong with these fonts that an amateur like me
>> can't spot from the PDF samples?
> 
> There is something wrong which even an amateur like you should be able
> to notice:
> 
>  http://contrapunctus.net/league/haques/fs500tex/fs500tex.pdf
> 
> page 49, "New Baskerville".
> 
> This font is completely broken and absolutely useless.  And some of
> the other fonts are broken too (awful kerning).
> 
> Yeah, the fonts are cheap, but this is not all what matters.  Fonts
> which are not provided by famous font vendors are often broken or
> incomplete.  Even if a font provides all glyphs required by Adobe
> StandardEncoding, you can't be sure that kerning pairs are
> appropriate.
> 
> I don't think that it's sufficient to simply run fontinst \latinfamily
> on arbitrary fonts in order to create TFM files.  Especially if crappy
> AFM files are involved.
> 
> BTW, what we need in the TeX world are high-quality fonts, not as many
> fonts as possible.
> 
> Regards,
>  Reinhard
> 
> -- 
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> Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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