[GNU-linux-libre] some adobe cmap files freed

[Karl Berry]

We note the problem with Adobe's CMap files on
http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Software_blacklist.  There is some good news
in this regard; Ken Lunde from Adobe has made them available under a
permissive license.

The present release does not completely solve our problems.  Additional
files used by poppler and others, such as GBK-EUC-UCS2, remain
encumbered.  The good news there is that Ken and the Acrobat group that
"manages" them see no problems with freeing them as well, and perhaps it
will happen relatively soon.

The two most interesting messages IMHO below; the whole thread is on the
lists.tug.org/tex-live list if anyone cares.  I already told the GNU
Ghostscript maintainer.

Best,
Karl


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Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:24:37 -0700
From: Ken Lunde <address@hidden>
Subject: "CMap Resources" open source project

I would like to let you know that we just launched the "CMap  
Resources" open source project at Adobe, which puts all of our CMap  
resources under a more favorable open source license. Note that I  
excluded the Adobe-Japan2-0 CMap resources, because they have been in  
deprecated status ever since Adobe-Japan1-6 was released to completely  
cover JIS X 0212-1990.

Anyway, you can get the details here:

   http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/cmap/

When you have a chance, please notify the appropriate people in the  
open source community about this. I know that some of them have been  
asking us to provide our CMap resources under a more favorable  
license, and for them, that day has come.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:04:50 -0700
From: Ken Lunde <address@hidden>

> [A TeX Live contributor wrote:]
> Just curious, it does not seemed to contain "Unicode Mapping files"  
> like GBK-EUC-UCS2, Adobe-GB1-UCS2, GBpc-EUC-UCS2, etc. Are they  
> dropped? Because it is useful for dvipdfmx to generate correct  
> bookmarks if the source encoding is not Unicode.

These are not CMap resources, but they indeed use CMap syntax. It is  
thus easy to confuse them with genuine CMap resources. A genuine CMap  
resource maps character codes to CIDs in a unidirectional manner.

Some of the files you mentioned, such as Adobe-GB1-UCS2, are ToUnicode  
mapping files, which unidirectionally map CIDs to UTF-16 character  
codes. The others map between character codes, or have other  
specialized purposes for Acrobat or Distiller.

I maintain all CMap resources at Adobe Systems, and although the  
Acrobat team manages the ToUnicode mapping files, I am the one who  
maintains them. Almost all of the other Acrobat-specific mapping files  
(that use CMap syntax) have not changed for years. If memory serves,  
most were introduced during Acrobat 4.0 development, and haven't  
changed since then.

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