Re: AFMs for BlueSky CM Type 1 PS fonts...

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

Melissa writes:

   Sometimes I think this is the strangest mailing list. We've spent lots
   of time talking about Unicode and `dotless j's, but haven't mentioned
   one of the most interesting developments of late, namely BlueSky's
   donation of it's type 1 CM fonts to the public domain. 

Some corrections: it was not quite a `donation', AMS, SIAM, Springer,
BSR and Y&Y worked out some arrangement for this to happen.  All
parties should get credit.  I assume that AMS is preparing some kind
of announcement.

And the fonts are *not* in the public domain, they have AMS copyright.
The intents is to have them be used freely, but it is important to
retain the copyright to prevent mischief and misuse.

   Perhaps the
   assumption is that this has been adequately covered in comp.text.tex?

Certainly a lot of postings there with that subject line, but on other topics..

   (Reminds me of how the addition of partial font downloading to dvips
   passed by just as quietly.)

Well, it isn't news in the sense that it has been in DVIPSONE since 1990
and nobody seemed to make much of a fuss over that either :=)

   As things stand, however, I see a problem with the current distribution
   of these fonts. We currently have one distribution for Macintosh users
   and one for ATM users, but no complete distribution. What I mean here
   is that we're missing the AFM files for these fonts; it's true that
   there are tools that could generate AFM files both from the Mac font
   bundles and from the PFM files, and even perhaps from the original TFM
   files, yet I would have thought there would be cannonical AFM files from
   the creation of the font that may very well be more complete than any
   of these.

   Does anyone here (Berthold, for example?) have these AFM files that they
   could make available? Currently, I feel that my best bet may be to keep
   the AFM files from the BaKoMa fonts and use those (?).

* The AFM files exist, of course.  It is up to AMS to decide what to do
* with them.  As you point out, they are not very important for use with
* TeX since (i) everyone already has TFM files and (ii) CM fonts have
* fixed encoding so no need to make new TFMs.  However, Display
* PostScript users will want PFA and AFM files...

       Melissa.

   P.S. Yes, you can claim that I don't really *need* AFM files most of
   the time, since I'm typesetting with TeX, but then I never use /bin/gdb
   yet it's nice to know it's there, just in case.