[bug #62921] want another monospaced font in the default set

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #62921 (project groff):

[comment #4 comment #4:]

> Hi, original submitter here. Yes, your solution would be fine, but I'm a bit
confused. For groff 1.22.4 in Fedora 36 I noticed there are 3 *.pfa_ files in
/usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devps/: freeeuro.pfa_, symbolsl.pfa_,
zapfdr.pfa_
> Those files seem to be included with the source code distribution at
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/groff/groff-1.22.4.tar.gz .

Yes, that is all correct.  The reasons these exist were not well-documented
until very recently (in groff Git).


       Special fonts include S, the PostScript Symbol font; ZD, Zapf
       Dingbats; SS (slanted symbol), which contains oblique forms of
       lowercase Greek letters derived from Symbol; EURO, which offers a
       Euro glyph for use with old devices lacking it; and ZDR, a
       reversed version of ZapfDingbats (with symbols flipped about the
       vertical axis).  Most glyphs in these fonts are unnamed and must
       be accessed using \N.  The last three are not standard PostScript
       fonts, but supplied by groff and therefore included in the
       default download file.


Although even that (from _grops_(1)) doesn't go into detail.

(1) The "EURO" font is needed because old PostScript printers' built-in fonts
didn't have a glyph for the Euro.

(2) The "SS" font is needed because the lowercase Greek letters for which AT&T
_troff_ predefines special character escape sequences ( `\(*a` for alpha, and
so forth) are canonically italic/oblique, but the PostScript Symbol font that
supplies lowercase Greek letters uses upright renderings for them.

(3) "ZDR" is necessary because while AT&T troff predefined special character
escape sequences for both "hand pointing left" and "hand pointing right"
glyphs (`\(lh` and `\(rh`, respectively), the PostScript symbol font supplied
only a "hand pointing right" glyph.

> So couldn't that same bundling be done for an additional monospaced font?
The /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devps/freeeuro.afm and
/usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devps/freeeuro.pfa_ files are the only places
where the FreeEuro font exists on my Fedora system, as far as I know.

That makes sense to me.  Nearly all fonts that are Free Software were produced
after the establishment of the Euro zone in 1999, and the glyph for that
currency simply could not be ignored.  In contrast, by 1999, I think Adobe had
largely put PostScript into legacy or maintenance mode, and shifted its
efforts into promulgating PDF instead.

> I'm just confused on why the corresponding afm/pfa files for a new
monospaced font couldn't also be included, in addition to being mentioned in
the /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devps/download file like FreeEuro is. Unless
I'm wrong and those were added by the groff package maintainers for Fedora.

They _could_ be included, and the files you note are emplaced by the "install"
rule of _groff_'s Makefile.

It is a question of whether it is a good idea for the _groff_ project, which
is not drowning in developers, to expand its charter to get into the general
purpose font distribution business.  We ship font files for those 3 special
cases for PostScript (only of which, "EURO", is needed for PDF output, and
that likely pretty seldom).  But those fonts are all of limited repertoire;
they don't even contain the Latin alphabet.  They are provided to ensure that
glyphs are available for practical _troff_ documents; going without the Euro
glyph or slanted lowercase Greek letters would be ruinous for many purposes.

A few gaps still remain thanks to the Adobe Symbol font introducing some
glyphs that "old" AT&T _troff_ (before Kernighan's addition of device
independence) did not countenance; I raised this issue on the groff discussion
list back in March
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-03/msg00016.html>.

Ideally, distributors like Fedora and Debian would have "package triggers",
scripts that hook up the plumbing between TrueType fonts installed on the
system, and the _grops_ and _gropdf_ output drivers.  But even after almost 30
years this has never happened.  The reason may be that the specialized
knowledge required is fairly scarce, in part due to under-documentation of
these things by _groff_, a situation I have been working to address.

The tedium of integrating fonts into _groff_'s PostScript and PDF support is a
known defect, filed as bug #58831.


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