[Fedora TeX Live] Current license review status?

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 6:33 PM, Bob Tennent wrote:
>
> On my F17 system:
>
> /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public/lm/lmroman12-regular.otf
> /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/lm/lmr12.pfb

These two should both stay. Really.

>  >|TeX fonts shouldn't confuse fontconfig unless fontconfig is configured
>  >|to look for fonts in texmf tree.
>
> But also
>
> /usr/share/fonts/tex-lm/lmroman12-regular.otf
> /usr/share/fonts/tex-lm/lmr12.pfb

But these two might be problematic. In particular, I would probably
hate it if my system would install
    /usr/share/fonts/tex-lm/lmr12.pfb
along with TeX Live. The font lmr12.pfb is only really needed by TeX.
Sure, other programs could use it, but like it was mentioned before,
it's an outdated technology, and there's the lmroman12-regular.otf if
it needs to be.

> because the former are sym links to the latter. I wouldn't say
> fontconfig is confused

It is in the sense that if user wants to use, say,
"LMRoman12-Regular", it's often not clear whether the pfb or otf
should be chosen. Maybe my example is not 100% accurate, but if two
fonts share the same name it might be a problem in many programs,
including TeX where one font is chosen by XeTeX and the other one by
xdvipdfmx, and these two might be different. I can try to find the
relevant threads in archives, but users definitely had problems with
that in past.

> but any user will be by the dozens of essentially
> useless TeX-related fonts that are displayed in, for example, Firefox.

I totally agree. I wouldn't want the package to install them all. Or
at least, I would offer them as optional installs, not as something
that has to be installed unconditionally along TeX.

The command
    find /usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-dist/fonts/type1 | wc
lists 5417 lines. That's probably slightly less fonts, but still, I
wouldn't want to get them all visible in LibreOffice just because they
get installed by TeX. Possibly as a separate package, but definitely
not by default.

On the other hand, if you remove fonts from
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist you could make the TeX installation
useless for many users.



On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 8:49 PM, Jindrich Novy wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 01, 2012 at 06:02:46PM +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>
>> But it's not excluded that I misunderstood the meaning. Just to make
>> sure: in TeX live there are two font files:
>>     <texmf</fonts/opentype/public/lm/lmroman12-regular.otf
>>     <texmf>/fonts/type1/public/lm/lmr12.pfb
>> with exactly the same font, except that one is OpenType and the other
>> one is Type1.
>
> Hmm, good catch. If some packages ship the same fonts just to be in
> different formats then I could modify spec generator to ship the font
> just in one preferred format.

No, it's not just to have them in different formats. Neither pdfTeX
nor any other TeX or MetaPost engine (except for LuaTeX & XeTeX) is
capable of handling OpenType fonts. Not at all. So
lmroman12-regular.otf is not usable for majority of TeX users. On the
other hand, LuaTeX and XeTeX users would *want* the OpenType font,
since the other one is not capable of handling Unicode properly. The
font being used really depends on engine and as long as you want to
support all engines, you cannot simply deprecate one format of the
same font in favour of the other.

You could remove them from /usr/share/fonts easily, but not from texmf
trees. That would break just about everything.

And then there is OpenType Math which is a beast on its own.

> Not sure whether something will not break
> for TeX Live users if they rely on specific font format to be around.

TeX engines do rely on specific font format. 8-bit engines cannot work
with OTF fonts and Unicode engines have problems with the old fonts.

Mojca

PS: If I was in charge of packaging, I would leave all the font inside
texmf, and if users want to instal fonts systemwide, provide a package
that would make symlinks from /usr/share/fonts/tex/<fontfamily>/<font>
to /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/<path/to>/<font>