Le vendredi 19 octobre 2018 à 15:02 -0400, R P Herrold a écrit :
On Fri, 19 Oct 2018, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le mercredi 17 octobre 2018 à 14:03 -0400, R P Herrold a écrit :
I am not sure how that indicates 'poor' ... 'unfortunate',
perhaps, as that is indeed the use case I face, for government
PDF fillable forms, and insurance company PDF forms
> That or a bit of xpdf is still unable to process Opentype fonts in
2018,
> and will fail if there is no Postscript 1 font on system for the
> standard PS font families.
I suspect the latter as the problem began after urw-base35
displaced the former (Type 1 bearing) urw-fonts, and thus my
wish for:
Stop wishing for that, there's no technical reason at all in 2018 to use
PS1 fonts over Opentype ones. OpenType CFF (.otf) fonts have the very
same technical format for curves as PostScript 1 fonts, but the metadata
around those curves is vastly more complete and solves real-world
problems identified since PS 1 fonts were defined.
The reason the fonts you list are more bulky is not some problem in
their format, they're more bulky because they have more encoding
coverage.
PS1 is deader than dead, fontconfig still supports it but apps like
LibreOffice have started rejecting it upstream even when fontconfig
presents it (the app writers are fed up with writing workarounds to
compensate for the holes in the PS1 metadata).
So Fedora, as a distribution, has no interest in shipping PS1 fonts
anymore. They don't bring any value over the equivalent OTF fonts, they
are inherently dangerous due to the PS1 format deficiencies, they result
in bugs when an app is confused in selecting them over their OTF
equivalent. If you want to expend some lobbying energy, get xpdf and
other stragglers to fix their fontconfig/opentype support. You won't
stem the fontconfig/opentype tide. It had 15 years to build up both in
the FLOSS and proprietary world. It's way too late to rewrite history
now.
--
Nicolas Mailhot