TeX and Lucida fonts

[Karl Berry]

Regarding the Lucida fonts and TeX, the legal part is over and all is
good for redistributing them.  Both TUG and at least one other TeX
vendor will be making them available, while cooperating on keeping the
underlying fonts compatible.  (Don't mean to be secretive, but it's not
my place to make announcements except for TUG.)

As far as the TUG Lucida distribution goes, the main job now is to
update the (La)TeX support files.  The fonts are nearly identical to
what Y&Y distributed, but there are a few changes (hopefully
improvements!) in the text encodings and metrics.  No changes are
planned for the math fonts.

I'd be very grateful if anyone here can volunteer to work on this for
TUG with me.  We can't offer money, but at least you'll get a copy of
the fonts out of it :), and of course grateful public acknowledgement.
As far as a timeframe goes, I'm hoping that we'll be able to make the
fonts available in the reasonably near future, i.e., a couple/few weeks,
but of course there are a lot of variables, including whether a
volunteer comes forward :).

If you're interested, please let me know.

Thanks,
Karl

P.S. In a way, it is strange to be writing to this list about it; the
new distribution will not (completely) work on Y&Y installations, for a
number of reasons.  So the macro updates will have to be done using
something more current, e.g., teTeX, MiKTeX, TeX Live.  As far as the
volunteer reimbursement goes, though, you can have exactly what y&y
distributed if that's what you want :).