At 11:00 09/10/2003, you wrote:
Hi,
Hans Hagen
writes: So what is wrong with adobekb.tex? It is now included in ConTeXt, so with \usetypescript[adobekb][someencoding] your psnfss fonts should work fine.
i can make a default for that but only when i can be absolutely sire that the metrics are there that i want there to be -)
According to to the statements from Walter Schmidt, a TeX font expert (perhaps I should say *the* TeX font expert?) in http://tug.daimi.au.dk/archives/tex-fonts/msg01328.html
\quote{% .... Note, however, that embedding of URW's fonts, while using the (PSNFSS) Adobe Base35 metrics, will _not_ lead to any bugs! The character metrics are matching! Differences in the "character bounding boxes" are irrelevant for the advance widths! The only drawback is, that you cannot access those glyphs that are in the URW fonts, but not in the Adobe fonts. Indeed, this could be overcome by providing particular metrics and VFs for the URW fonts -- see below. }
hm, there are more font experts (nelson b, boguslaw j, adam t, tom k, some people on this list as well, to mention a few), here is what Nelson Beebe says about this topic in a different thread ..
Walter confirms what I have assumed: we can use the "Adobe" metrics from the PSNFSS bundle with the URW fonts.
I have serious reservations about this. While as far as I know, there has been only one release of URW fonts, and thus only one pair of (.pf[ab],.afm) files for each typeface, with Adobe fonts, over the last 19 years, there have been silent changes made to at least AFM files for many fonts, including Times-Roman. This makes me suspect that the base-14 or base-35 fonts embedded in tens of millions of laser printers with Adobe PostScript implementations may in fact not be identical, even though they share common font names. Of course, the changes are usually pretty small, and few people would ever notice. However, precise character positioning demands knowledge of metrics, and if a TeX job uses metrics which differ from those embedded with a font in a printer, and uses the resident fonts, rather than downloading them, then output will certainly not be what TeX (and the user) intended. That is one reason why I've never been entirely happy with fontless PostScript and PDF files, and why I was exceedingly unhappy with the change in Adobe Illustrator last year that completely ignores embedded fonts, and uses only installed fonts. The program MIME-attached below can be used to compare AFM files, and I have just done so with the texlive7/texmf/fonts/afm/{adobe,urw}/times/*.afm files. The first thing to note is that the URW fonts contain many more glyphs: 316 for Times-Roman compared to Adobe's 228. A TeX file that used any of the additional URW glyphs would print incorrectly with Adobe's Times-Roman. The second thing is that the bounding boxes can be a bit different, and sometimes very different, even when the widths are identical: % awk -f afmdiff.awk /tmp/afm/adobe/times/ptmr8a.afm /tmp/afm/urw/times/utmr8a.afm Comparison of AFM metrics in files: /tmp/afm/adobe/times/ptmr8a.afm /tmp/afm/urw/times/utmr8a.afm Font names: Times-Roman NimbusRomNo9L-Regu ... WX width differences: Bounding box width differences: dagger -1 dieresis -1 dotaccent -1 exclam 1 exclamdown 1 Idieresis -1 idieresis 39 three -1 threesuperior -1 Bounding box height differences: Adieresis 1 adieresis 1 aring -10 Aring -17 asciitilde 6 dieresis 1 dotaccent 1 Edieresis 1 edieresis 1 exclamdown -2 greater -4 Idieresis 1 idieresis 1 less -4 Odieresis 1 odieresis 1 plusminus -62 q -1 questiondown -2 s 1 Udieresis 1 udieresis 1 Ydieresis 1 ydieresis 1 TeX uses more than just the bare width, so I suspect that we can readily demonstrate different typesetting with these two purportedly-compatible Times-Roman fonts from URL and Adobe. As a simple experiment, I created two DVI files with "tex testfont", like this: % tex testfont This is TeX, Version 3.1415 (C version 6.1) (/usr/local/lib/tex/inputs/testfont.tex Name of the font to test = ptmr8r Now type a test command (\help for help):) *\table *\bye [1] Output written on testfont.dvi (1 page, 10632 bytes). Transcript written on testfont.log. % mv testfont.dvi testfont-ptmr8r.dvi and similarly for utmr8r. I then ran dv2dt on both, and compared the output: % dv2dt < testfont-utmr8r.dvi > testfont-utmr8r.dt % dv2dt < testfont-ptmr8r.dvi > testfont-ptmr8r.dt % diff testfont-utmr8r.dt testfont-ptmr8r.dt 19c19 < (utmr8r) --- > (ptmr8r) 33,34c33,34 < d3 1518460 < d3 1911676 --- > d3 1512892 > d3 1906108 191c191 < fd1 50 24364160751 655360 655360 0 6 'utmr8r' --- > fd1 50 4767720433 655360 655360 0 6 'ptmr8r' 291c291 < d3 721220 --- > d3 715652 306c306 < sr 1016132 26214 --- > sr 1010564 26214 ... many more ... Clearly, the DVI files differ somewhat. I did similar AFM comparison experiments with the 3 other times fonts in TeXLive 7: % awk -f afmdiff.awk /tmp/afm/adobe/times/ptmri8a.afm /tmp/afm/urw/times/utmri8a.afm % awk -f afmdiff.awk /tmp/afm/adobe/times/ptmbi8a.afm /tmp/afm/urw/times/utmbi8a.afm % awk -f afmdiff.awk /tmp/afm/adobe/times/ptmb8a.afm /tmp/afm/urw/times/utmb8a.afm All had identical character widths, but many differences in bounding boxes. Thus, I believe that it would be wrong to claim that the URW fonts are true drop-in replacements for the Adobe fonts, and of course there will be minor shape differences as well, some of which may be visible to sharp-eyed readers, at least in heading-size characters. As an additional experiment, I ran the locate command on our large Unix installation, and found 64 instances of Times-Roman.afm. MD5 checksums of these files showed that there are only 7 different ones, so I ran the afmdiff.awk program on those 7. While there were no differences reported in character widths, there were many differences in bounding boxes and even in glyph counts (210, 228, and 315, depending on the file): The copyright statements look like this: Comment Copyright (c) 1984 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Comment Copyright (c) 1984 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Comment Copyright (c) 1985, 1987, 1989 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Comment Copyright (c) 1985, 1987, 1989, 1990 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Comment Copyright (c) 1985, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1997 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Notice Copyright (c) 1985, 1987, 1989 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.Times is a trademark of Linotype AG and/or its subsidiaries. Notice Copyright (c) 1985, 1987, 1989, 1990 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.Times is a trademark of Linotype AG and/or its subsidiaries. Notice Copyright (c) 1985, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1997 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.Times is a trademark of Linotype-Hell AG and/or its subsidiaries.