Standard Adobe Fonts -- using the URW substitutes.

[James Richard Tyrer]

There are URW fonts that mimic the standard Adobe fonts.

GhostScript comes with a Fontmap file to use them in place of the actual Adobe
fonts.

There is a file:

ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/fonts/urw-adobe-fonts.dir

which can be uses as the: "fonts.dir" file that will trick the old X font system
into using the URW fonts when the actual Adobe fonts are requested.

However, I haven't found an implementation of this for FontConfig.

Google found:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-print-list/2003-February/msg00020.html

But I work on KDE where the problem appears to be that users are getting scaled
bit mapped fonts in Konqueror KHTML rather than using the URW scalable Type1
fonts (which are installed).

And applying this to the 14 common fonts:

<alias>
<family>Times</family>
<accept><family>NimbusRomNo9L</family></accept>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>Helvetica</family>
<accept><family>NimbusSanL</family></accept>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>Courier</family>
<accept><family>NimbusMonL</family></accept>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>Symbol</family>
<accept><family>StandardSymL</family></accept>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>ZapfDingbats</family>
<accept><family>Dingbats</family></accept>
</alias>

Should work except that there is a problem. XFree86 normally comes with bit
mapped versions of (some or all of) these fonts and they will have an exact name
match so this won't work. It still uses the bit mapped versions and scales them
-- users complaint that these are ugly (they are :-)).

This needs to prefer scalable. Is there a way to issue the command in general
to prefer scalable (or not to accept scaled bit mapped fonts) in all cases or is
it necessary to do this for each family? If done for each family, it should be
written so that the real Adobe font would be used if it was installed on the
system. That is, it needs to override the bit mapped font that is an exact name
match, but use the scalable one if available and if the exact match of the
scalable is not available then use the scalable alias.

In either case, could you point me to some information on how to do it? I am
not yet an XML expert and this appears a little too complicated for me.

Perhaps this could be implemented for all 35 standard Adobe fonts to use the URW
Type1 fonts if the real scalable one wasn't available and distributed with
FontConfig. If this is a rather large file, I would suggest a separate file:
"URW.conf" with a link in: "local.conf".

Perhaps a separate one for the "Bitstream Vera" fonts would also be a good idea.

--
JRT