Re: LilyPond 2.3.0 released

[Werner LEMBERG]

> The Debian maintainer disagrees, he claims lmodern is (usually
> considered to be) better:

This is correct, basically.  But lmodern is `more' work in progress
than cm-super -- it doesn't contain Cyrillic glyphs yet.  Besides
this, the quality and hinting is *excellent*.

>      The Latin Modern fonts were generated using MetaType1, a
>      program based on MetaPost for generating PostScript Type 1
>      fonts (ftp://bop.eps.gda.pl/pub/metatype1/). Their size is
>      reasonable and they are usually considered to be of good
>      quality (compared to cm-super, for instance).

Yep.

> However, Han-Wen asserts that CM-like font generation using (modified)
> metapost is 1. next to impossible,

Han-Wen is wrong :-)

> 2. higly improbable and

These guys have it really done like that.  It is a semi-automated
process.  Recently there was an article about their work in one of the
last TUGBoat issues, IIRC.  One of the authors, Bogusław Jackowski
<address@hidden>, is really a font guru who is a master of
MetaFont and MetaPost.

> 3. certainly not available to the general public,

The scripts and/or programs, AFAIK, are at the above ftp address.
Everything is under the GPL.

> and that 4. Florent Rougon's claim that the lmodern package has done
> exactly that, must be bullshit.

I think this is premature...

> After spending a hacking night invain trying to replace
> ec-fonts-mftraced, I don't feel like looking at this real soon
> again.  Unless, of course, I have a very good reason to.  Our
> ec-fonts-mftraced package works fine, and we also have full control
> over it.

What are the problems?  Looking into font.scm, I see your complaints
but I don't understand all of them:

  . The `Generated' tag is of course a bug which you should report to
    the author.

  . It is a logical consequence of fonts which have more than 256
    glyphs that a single TFM file is not sufficient.  cork-*.tfm is
    not a bad name for T1 encoding.  cm-super has much more tfm files
    per font (mainly for Cyrillic: T2A, T2B, T2C, X2, etc.).  Why do
    you think that lmodern's TFM files aren't usable?

  . Whether the EncodingScheme in the AFM file is `FontSpecific' or
    not is completely irrelevant in case you want to access all glyphs
    in the font (this is the majority, having the `C -1' field).  You
    have to reencode the font on the fly -- please don't use the
    static dvips approach of using external reencoding vectors.  Again
    I suggest to have a look at the PS frontend of groff...

> > If debian really substitutes cm-super with lmodern you should
> > complain loudly.
>
> Could you spell out this complaint for me, or better yet, maybe
> complain directly yourself?

Well, it's easy: There should be both a cm-super and an lmodern
package since the latter doesn't really replace the former.


    Werner