[tex-live] Bug#666791: g-brief uses marvosym, but both defined \EMail

[Robin Fairbairns]

Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 11:10, Norbert Preining wrote:
> >
> >> I already wanted to upload the package to CTAN when I realized that
> >> back then we had a problem with whether or not we are allowed to
> >> distribute original PDF documentation. Martin Vogel replied to me
> >> with:
> >
> > ...
> >
> >> So my question before uploading a fixed version is: based on his
> >> reply, am I allowed to add his original PDF documentation to the
> >> package?
> >
> > INAL but I would say yes, of course, it is very clear. But keep in mind,
> > is there also the source code of the pdf?
> 
> Uncompressed PDF is just a text file, isn't it?

maybe; but it still has pointers which mean that editing involves
replacing text without changing the text's length.  it's not normally
considered a sane thing to do.

> You can also easily
> use any tool like InDesign to modify it if hand-editing PDF file by
> hand sounds too complicated ;)

who's "you"?  i've never even seen a copy of indesign; arguing from that
to saying that you don't need source in tl ... is a non-starter.

> The document has been created with some ancient version of Star Office
> (that's probably a predecessor of OpenOffice/LibreOffice, so there is
> even a slight chance that it could be opened :). That source document
> is not part of the zip, but even if it was it would probably be almost
> useless since even if one would be able to open it, it would be a bit
> difficult to convince Office to use the right version of font and the
> right glyphs. (It would probably work after some time, but it would be
> a nontrivial task.)
> 
> In principle it is trivial to reproduce the document (or even to just
> copy-paste from PDF to Writer and fix some problems; or maybe
> replicate the document in TeX), but I see no compelling reason to do
> so. It is just work (trivial work) that takes time and doesn't bring
> any benefit apart from being able to say that "we have the source now"
> and resulting in a document just a tiny bit different from author's
> original. Using common-sense, replicating the document is a less
> friendly gesture towards the author than simply including the original
> PDF. If anyone feels a need to do whatever changes in the document,
> (s)he can always do that when the need arises.

fine.  we can hold the pdf on ctan, but tl won't take anything for which
there is no source.

> The document contains 12 pages of a table with
>     (graphical symbol, character number, latin1 character to type,
> PostScript name, German description, English description)
> plus Author's contact information and some tiny examples at the end.

it is indeed going to be a joy to reproduce the document in tex.

robin