Follow-up Comment #5, bug #62921 (project groff): [comment #4 comment #4:]
> Hi, original submitter here. Yes, your solution would be fine, but I'm a bit confused. For groff 1.22.4 in Fedora 36 I noticed there are 3 *.pfa_ files in /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devps/: freeeuro.pfa_, symbolsl.pfa_, zapfdr.pfa_ > Those files seem to be included with the source code distribution at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/groff/groff-1.22.4.tar.gz . Yes, that is all correct. The reasons these exist were not well-documented until very recently (in groff Git). Special fonts include S, the PostScript Symbol font; ZD, Zapf Dingbats; SS (slanted symbol), which contains oblique forms of lowercase Greek letters derived from Symbol; EURO, which offers a Euro glyph for use with old devices lacking it; and ZDR, a reversed version of ZapfDingbats (with symbols flipped about the vertical axis). Most glyphs in these fonts are unnamed and must be accessed using \N. The last three are not standard PostScript fonts, but supplied by groff and therefore included in the default download file. Although even that (from _grops_(1)) doesn't go into detail. (1) The "EURO" font is needed because old PostScript printers' built-in fonts didn't have a glyph for the Euro. (2) The "SS" font is needed because the lowercase Greek letters for which AT&T _troff_ predefines special character escape sequences ( `\(*a` for alpha, and so forth) are canonically italic/oblique, but the PostScript Symbol font that supplies lowercase Greek letters uses upright renderings for them. (3) "ZDR" is necessary because while AT&T troff predefined special character escape sequences for both "hand pointing left" and "hand pointing right" glyphs (`\(lh` and `\(rh`, respectively), the PostScript symbol font supplied only a "hand pointing right" glyph. > So couldn't that same bundling be done for an additional monospaced font? The /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devps/freeeuro.afm and /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devps/freeeuro.pfa_ files are the only places where the FreeEuro font exists on my Fedora system, as far as I know. That makes sense to me. Nearly all fonts that are Free Software were produced after the establishment of the Euro zone in 1999, and the glyph for that currency simply could not be ignored. In contrast, by 1999, I think Adobe had largely put PostScript into legacy or maintenance mode, and shifted its efforts into promulgating PDF instead. > I'm just confused on why the corresponding afm/pfa files for a new monospaced font couldn't also be included, in addition to being mentioned in the /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devps/download file like FreeEuro is. Unless I'm wrong and those were added by the groff package maintainers for Fedora. They _could_ be included, and the files you note are emplaced by the "install" rule of _groff_'s Makefile. It is a question of whether it is a good idea for the _groff_ project, which is not drowning in developers, to expand its charter to get into the general purpose font distribution business. We ship font files for those 3 special cases for PostScript (only of which, "EURO", is needed for PDF output, and that likely pretty seldom). But those fonts are all of limited repertoire; they don't even contain the Latin alphabet. They are provided to ensure that glyphs are available for practical _troff_ documents; going without the Euro glyph or slanted lowercase Greek letters would be ruinous for many purposes. A few gaps still remain thanks to the Adobe Symbol font introducing some glyphs that "old" AT&T _troff_ (before Kernighan's addition of device independence) did not countenance; I raised this issue on the groff discussion list back in March <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-03/msg00016.html>. Ideally, distributors like Fedora and Debian would have "package triggers", scripts that hook up the plumbing between TrueType fonts installed on the system, and the _grops_ and _gropdf_ output drivers. But even after almost 30 years this has never happened. The reason may be that the specialized knowledge required is fairly scarce, in part due to under-documentation of these things by _groff_, a situation I have been working to address. The tedium of integrating fonts into _groff_'s PostScript and PDF support is a known defect, filed as bug #58831. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62921> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/
