On Friday, 24 July 2026 02:39:04 British Summer Time G. Branden Robinson
wrote:
> Deri,
>
> I notice from Bruno's report on that[1] that the "URW" fonts come from a
> directory with "ghostscript" in its name. Is it possible some kind of
> old, stupefied, or quasi-broken fonts are present there, and we failed
> to detect their unuseful state for gropdf's full service level?
>
> Is there some way can test for such stupefaction without increasing our
> build-dependency burden?
>
> I do not have a Manjaro Linux environment readily available to explore;
> maybe you don't either. Can you suggest a test procedure to Bruno that
> might help us to improve our URW font detection macro?[2]
>
> Regards,
> Branden
If the URW fonts are only found under 'ghostscript' it is unlikely the
required AFM files are available. (I have not seen them as part of ghostscript
for many a year, I believe they are now baked into the executable in some
binary form - to improve speed).
This means pdf support will be 'intermediate' (all 35 fonts avilable same as
grops, but the extra 'U' foundry fonts - the failed tests - cannot be built
because afmtodit requires access to AFM files.
In this situation I would expect the cnfigure script to report 'intermediate',
and Bruno did not report any problem during the build so I am assuming
BuildFoundries did the right thing and silently avoided tying to run afmtodit
on non-existent afm files.
So the question is why did configure report 'full' when there were no afm
files only pfb files? I managed to duplicate the issue:-
GNU roff version 1.24.1.1122-5c005 configuration summary
----------------------------------------------------------------------
installation directory prefix : /usr/local
C++ compiler and options : g++ -g -O2
C compiler and options : gcc -g -O2
Perl interpreter version : 5.42.0
Ghostscript command : gs
URW fonts directory : /usr/share/ghostscript/10.07.0/Resource/
Font/
gropdf service level : full
X11 support : disabled
default paper format : A4
'groff -l' uses print spooler : lpr
preconv can use uchardet library : yes
can build groff.{info,html,txt} : no
can build groff.{dvi,pdf} : no
----------------------------------------------------------------------
But, only by using "--with-urw-fonts-dir=usr/share/ghostscript/10.07.0/
Resource/Font/". Without this it reports 'intermediate'.
This is on current git but I'm sure its the same on rc1.
And now for something completely different...
I noticed that when making our pdf documents it was actually using a previous
installed version of groff in /usr/local rather than the just built groff.
Cheers
Deri
