[tex-live] Real Helvetica?

[Zdenek Wagner]

2010/9/22 Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
> Time to put this thread to bed : one last response from me --
>
> Zdenek Wagner wrote:
>
>> Yes, but are you sure that they have the same metrics as the phv*.tfm
>> files in TeX
>
> No : mix-'n'-match, when it comes to fonts in particular,
> is a never-ending source of potential problems.
>
>> and that they really contain all accented characters that
>> are present in TeX encodings?
>
> No, see above.
>
>> What I want to
>> write is that it is dangerous to insert unknown font just because it
>> has some name. I once forgot to embed the real font (I gave the file
>> intended for my HP printer) to DTP for preparing the offset films and
>> unsusable films cost me a few houndred USD. I know a man who did
>> somethiong similar but unfortunatelly it was spot when everything was
>> printed and bound. The price of the books that have to be put to
>> garbage and printed again (500 misprints per page is really too many)
>> was about 30 thousand USD. Are you ready to undergo such a risk?
>
> But is your last para. not internally inconsistent ?  You start by
> arguing that it is dangerous to embed an unknown font just because

NO! It is dangerous to use non-embedded font. If you embed a font and
test that the dokument is displayed/printed correctly then everything
is OK. The problem is that if you do not embed Helvetica, you can
never be sure that a person who gets your document will have the same
Helvetica with the same metrics and the same accented characters. By
insertion I mean using the PS name of a font without embedding it.
>
> None of the preceding is intended to suggest that Mark should
> ignore your reference to Siep Kroonenberg's "Font installation
> the shallow way", but Siep's method does require that the user
> has the desired font as a PFB.  The HP Helvetica fonts to which
> I referred comes as TTFs, so are not amenable to this manipulation
> as far as I can tell, but could be used directly by XeTeX.
>
No, it doesn't require PFB. If the line in the map file does not
contain the PFB file name, the document will refer to the font by its
PS name but nothing will be embedded.

> ** Phil.
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz