Message-Id: <199403231536.AA21778@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
In-Reply-To:  <m0pjTx5-0006ReC@rsuna.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> (message from Frank
              Poppe on Wed, 23 Mar 1994 15:29:00 +0100)
Date:         Wed, 23 Mar 1994 15:28:00 GMT
From: Alan Jeffrey <alanje@cogs.sussex.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: LaTeX2e and PostScript
Status: R

Not very much to do with LaTeX3 ;-) but...

>It seems to me that the italic variant should be mapped to the italic
>shape in the NFSS scheme, while the oblique variants should be mapped to
>the slanted shape.

Yes, `slanted' and `oblique' are synonyms.

>In the PSNFSS package this is the case now, except
>for Courier-Oblique and  -BoldOblique, which are mapped to pcr/m/it and
>pcr/b/it (this should be pcr/m/sl and pcr/b/sl in my opinion).

Yes... the fd files in psnfss have some odd `features' which should be
fixed for the full distribution :-)

The main problem with oblique fonts is that some drivers don't support
faked oblique fonts.  So if we distribute oblique fonts as standard,
then some people won't be able to print the documents, or will get
strange font substitutions with no warning.  The final decision on
support for obliqued fonts is still `under construction'.

>times-roman e.g., my distribution (I suppose it came with DVIPS but I'm
>not sure) contains a ptmro.tfm and ptmro.vf, while the rptmro entry in
>PSFONTS.MAP refers to: Times-Roman ".167 SlantFont"

The fonts which come with dvips are *not* the fonts supported by
psnfss!  If you're using psnfss, you should make sure you're using the
fonts that come with it...  In particular, the dvips fonts refer to
`rptmro' as the raw Adobe Times-Oblique, rather than `ptmr0' which is
the `approved' font name.

>I wonder if these tfm- and vf-files have been made for other PS fonts?

There are plans to convert the entire Monotype CD-rom into TFM and VF
format.  This may take some time...

>Finally I wondered about the Helvetiva-Narrow fonts. The PSNFSS package
>does not use them. I have added entries in the FD file for phv/c/n,
>etc., and this works well.

The standard Helvetica PSNFSS fd file doesn't support
Helvetica-Narrow, since many drivers don't have it, and the `Laser
Writer 35' package is meant to work with (almost) any PostScript
printer.

If you do have extra fonts you'd like to add to your local FD file,
feel free!  But please either:

 a) change the name of the family, or
 b) don't distribute the resulting fd file.

In either case, you should change any identification information
(comments, \typeout's, \wlog's, \ProvidesFile, etc. etc.) to make it
clear that you've changed the .fd file.

Sorry to sound draconian, but document portability is one of the major
selling points of LaTeX, and if different sites have different fd
files with the same name, this doesn't help much!

>Did anybody make TFM and VF files for the
>"real" Helvetica-Narrow fonts?

The tool for doing this is `fontinst' (OK, so I wrote it :-) and is on
CTAN.  If anyone's used fontinst to install any fonts, and they'd like
to share them with the rest of the TeX community, please mail me and
I'll include them in the fontinst contrib directory.

Yours,

Alan.

Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +44 273 606755 x 3238         alanje@cogs.susx.ac.uk
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, Sussex Univ., Brighton BN1 9QH, UK