[tex-live] dvipdfmx in TL2014

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2014-05-19 at 18:42:37 +0200, Ulrike Fischer wrote:

 > Am Mon, 19 May 2014 12:22:51 -0400 schrieb Bob Tennent:
 > 
 > > I'm getting the following messages:
 > > 
 > > dvipdfmx:warning: Obsolete four arguments of "endchar" will be used
 > > for Type 1 "seac" operator.
 > > 
 > > What do they mean?  How do I suppress them?
 > 
 > The seac operator is deprecated
 > (http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_composite.html)
 > and a constant source of problem expecially with xetex (google a bit
 > and you will find quite a lot postings). 
 > 
 > So the best is to correct the font (or not to use it). Which one is
 > it?

Ulrike, what you suggest can never be a solution.  Almost every Type 1
font developped in the last three decades is using the seac operator.
After zillions of fonts had been created by Adobe and other foundries,
Adobe now declares seac as deprecated?  Sounds like a joke.

It's a matter of fact that seac supports only glyphs in Adobe Standard
Encoding and thus its usage is quite limited for no good reason. It'a .
TeX's \accent primitive doesn't suffer from such a restriction.

I have the impression that the seac operator is simply a remnant of
the cold war.  Nobody expected at this time that one can make money
by selling Eastern European fonts.

Adobe now suggests to use subroutines in order to add accents to base
glyphs.  This is indeed more powerful.  Subroutines allow you to
describe accented characters quite efficiently.  There is no way to
use seac in order to support Vietnamese.  And AFAIK Latin Modern and
TeX Gyre are using subroutines because seac isn't helpful at all.

Though Adobe deprecates the seac operator now, there is absolutely no
reason that font rendering engines complain if it's used.

The message

 >> dvipdfmx:warning: Obsolete four arguments of "endchar" will be
 >> used for Type 1 "seac" operator.

is still unclear.  It doesn't say that the seac operator isn't
supported.  Bob, can you make the font accessible to me somehow?

Ulrike, you said:

 > The seac operator is deprecated and a constant source of problem
 > expecially with xetex

This simply means that XeTeX doesn't support Type 1 fonts properly, if
at all.  It's a severe bug if XeTeX complains that a font is using the
seac operator.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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