TeX fonts, part one [Was: Re: [Fedora-packaging] Proposed amendment to general packaging guidelines: no bundling of fonts in other packages]

[Vasile Gaburici]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 10:50 PM, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
> 2008/7/25 Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com>:
> I second the idea that TeX ought to be an exception to the guideline
> "not hide general-purpose fonts in app-specific directories"; TeX
> predates all other programs in a GNU/Linux system, and TeX users have
> hardended expectations about how it works; if Fedora's TeX package
> fiddles with things, that will be a loss for users.

If Fedora ships a screwed-up TeX, it would incur a loss of users,
mostly of PAYING academic ones that buy RHEL through their
departments, like UMD's CS dept., which just finished a big upgrade of
all the CS RHEL machines... FYI: Macs are already the preferred choice
for laptops amongst my colleagues, because the can run both Unix apps
and Powerpoint hassle-free (OOo is still pathetic for presentations,
and not everyone has the patience that Beamer requires, especially for
graphics).

Back to the technical side, a font for TeX requires a tfm file (TeX
font metrics). To use it with LaTeX you also need a fd file, an
sometimes a sty with macros is provided, especially if the font has
features. These files don't really belong the the system fonts
directory because nothing but TeX can use them... So, for fubu-fonts,
you'd need an extra fubu-fonts-tex, or possible even a
fubu-fonts-latex package to hold the extra files (you need the latter
if you consider that latex is not required to use plain tex).

What I would like to see system fonts installing themselves for TeX
use, say via an autoinst postinst script. Like I said my "draft"
email, that's a lot of hassle for the users to do manually. That's why
I'm trying to get fontools resurected...

Also, the current texlive package has inconsistent rules for font
formats. The Gyre fonts are included as OTF, while the LM (Latin
Modern) are not, even though XeTeX needs them that way if you wan to
select them as non-default fonts. I suspect this didn't originate from
upstream.