Re: wrong URW font directory used by gropdf (was: installed 'gropdf' incorrectly used for compilation)

[Deri]

On Friday, 7 October 2022 10:35:55 BST G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> One thing I don't understand is why "(gs)" (which, IIRC, means,
> "whatever Ghostscript's font search path reported in 'gs -h' is) comes
> right after the URW fonts directory when searching for Adobe or generic
> fonts but all the way at the end of the search path for fonts using the
> 'U' (URW) foundry.
> 
> Deri may well have explained this to me before and I have forgotten.  If
> the distinct placement is deliberate, we should add an explanatory
> comment.

Hi Branden,

So, there may be two sources of URW fonts, the ones which may be supplied with 
ghostscript 
(remember some versions supply them in %rom% which means they are not available 
to 
external programs), and as separate package generated from URW sources.

There is no guarantee that the fonts from different sources are the same, 
although the same 
glyphs will have identical widths. If using grops and ghostscript to produce 
pdfs, you will be 
using the ghostscript supplied fonts, so if you are using gropdf font TR it 
makes sense to use the 
same font which grops/ghostscript would use. When using U-TR (since you are 
specifically 
requesting the URW fonts are used) it makes sense to use the URW fonts first. 
If one of the 
sources is not available the fallback is to use the one which is available, in 
which case the 
download file would have the same paths for both foundries, default and U.

Even if there is only one source for the URW fonts, the difference between the 
default and U 
foundries is that afmtodit has been run on the files found so the U- fonts will 
contain more 
glyphs than the default fonts copied from the grops directory. I hope this 
explains why it makes 
sense to reverse the order for the two foundries. I'll leave the appropriate 
comment to you.

Cheers 

Deri