[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#721521: ITP: fonts-urw-base35 -- Set of the 35 PostScript Language Level 2 Base Fonts

[Fabian Greffrath]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Fabian Greffrath <fabian at greffrath.com>

* Package name    : fonts-urw-base35
  Version         : 2:20130628-1
  Upstream Author : (URW)++ Design & Development
* URL             : http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/fonts/
* License         : GPL (needs clarification, see #720906)
  Programming Lang: fonts
  Description     : Set of the 35 PostScript Language Level 2 Base Fonts
 A commercial-quality set of the basic 35 PostScript Type 1 fonts.
 Each font includes .pfb (outlines), .afm (metrics), and .pfm (Windows printer
 metrics) files. The fonts are compatible with general Type 1 manipulation
 tools as well as with Ghostscript.

This package will contain an updated set of the 35 PostScript base fonts, that
has been made available by upstream author URW++ to Artifex, the developers of
Ghostscript, and is already shipped as part of ghostscript 9.09. It is intended
to replace the gsfonts package, which contains a fork of an ancient version of
these fonts with added cyrilic glyphs. However, that fork is long unmaintained
upstream and the glyphs are of reportedly questionable quality, which I cannot
judge for myself, though. The package will also integrate the effort to make
the fonts available to an X server and thus replace the gsfonts-x11 package.
Finally, I am going to convince the texlive maintainers to replace their copy
of these fonts in the texlive-fonts-recommended package (used for the psnfss
latex-package) with this pristine release. All corresponsing package
maintainers are in CC.

I am going to maintain this package under the umbrella of the pkg-fonts team.
The license for the fonts used to be GPL, but a corresponding note has
apparently been forgotten in the current release. This issue is reported as
#720906 in Debian (against the ghostscript package, which already ships an
updated version of these fonts, but not yet this latest update) and has been
brought to the attention of ghostscript upstream who will strive for
clarification with URW++ in the short term.

 - Fabian