shared font directory

[Paul Vojta]

> From: Karl Berry <karl@cs.umb.edu>
> Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 18:53:01 -0400 (EDT)
> To: quinlan@transmeta.com
> Cc: tds@tug.org
> Subject: Re: shared font directory
> 
>     Whenever fonts are installed into /usr/share/fonts, each
>     post-installation script shall be executed.  
> 
> Executed by what?  (Just wondering.)

By whatever application does the installing.

>     For example, PostScript Type1 font files are usually stored directly
>     under the type1 directory.
> 
> Well, here's the real crux of the matter.  Not in TeX, they're not.

There's nothing about TeX that requires subdirectories.  Just the fact
that there are a large number of fonts, and the traditional choice of one
particular way to manage such a large set.

> Distributions these days seem to actually be converging, more or less,
> to what we specified in the TDS, which is use a
> <suppliername>/<familyname>/<fontname>.pf[ab]
> substructure under each font type
> (currently afm/ hbf/ ofm/ ovf/ ovp/ pfm/ pk/ source/ tfm/ ttf/ type1/ vf/)
> 
> It's a big pain to search that big tree, but I can't see abandoning it
> now, nor can I see requiring other applications to search it.  It would
> seem crazy for Ghostscript to put in all the effort to do recursive
> searches, for example.  And yet, without that, I don't see how the fonts
> are going to be shared.

Store them in a single directory, and use some other organizational tool
to keep track of what's what.  For example, Debian Linux has a large
/usr/bin directory, yet dpkg -L and dpkg -S are sufficient to keep track
of what's in there.

--Paul Vojta, vojta@math.berkeley.edu