We note the problem with Adobe's CMap files on http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Software_blacklist. There is some good news in this regard; Ken Lunde from Adobe has made them available under a permissive license.
The present release does not completely solve our problems. Additional files used by poppler and others, such as GBK-EUC-UCS2, remain encumbered. The good news there is that Ken and the Acrobat group that "manages" them see no problems with freeing them as well, and perhaps it will happen relatively soon. The two most interesting messages IMHO below; the whole thread is on the lists.tug.org/tex-live list if anyone cares. I already told the GNU Ghostscript maintainer. Best, Karl ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:24:37 -0700 From: Ken Lunde <[email protected]> Subject: "CMap Resources" open source project I would like to let you know that we just launched the "CMap Resources" open source project at Adobe, which puts all of our CMap resources under a more favorable open source license. Note that I excluded the Adobe-Japan2-0 CMap resources, because they have been in deprecated status ever since Adobe-Japan1-6 was released to completely cover JIS X 0212-1990. Anyway, you can get the details here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/cmap/ When you have a chance, please notify the appropriate people in the open source community about this. I know that some of them have been asking us to provide our CMap resources under a more favorable license, and for them, that day has come. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:04:50 -0700 From: Ken Lunde <[email protected]> > [A TeX Live contributor wrote:] > Just curious, it does not seemed to contain "Unicode Mapping files" > like GBK-EUC-UCS2, Adobe-GB1-UCS2, GBpc-EUC-UCS2, etc. Are they > dropped? Because it is useful for dvipdfmx to generate correct > bookmarks if the source encoding is not Unicode. These are not CMap resources, but they indeed use CMap syntax. It is thus easy to confuse them with genuine CMap resources. A genuine CMap resource maps character codes to CIDs in a unidirectional manner. Some of the files you mentioned, such as Adobe-GB1-UCS2, are ToUnicode mapping files, which unidirectionally map CIDs to UTF-16 character codes. The others map between character codes, or have other specialized purposes for Acrobat or Distiller. I maintain all CMap resources at Adobe Systems, and although the Acrobat team manages the ToUnicode mapping files, I am the one who maintains them. Almost all of the other Acrobat-specific mapping files (that use CMap syntax) have not changed for years. If memory serves, most were introduced during Acrobat 4.0 development, and haven't changed since then. [...]
