Re: PDF reader for Groff output

[Deri]

On Monday, 11 July 2022 09:15:07 BST Damian McGuckin wrote:
> I think the issue is that the more recent packages have the Type 1 font
> as a t1.

Hi Damian,

The .t1 files are in fact postscript binary fonts, just not named .pfb. The 
naming does not matter 
and when groff is built it will look for this particular name variant.

> Rather than screwing around with legacy packages, what is the best way
> to go from t1 to pfb please because certainly groff wants .pfb.

I believe Branden has commented on this with regard to using grops for output, 
i.e. you don't 
need to do anything, because the default for postscript is that these fonts do 
not need to be 
embedded, it is required that the consumer of the postscript file, a printer or 
distiller program, 
will have access to the necessary fonts.

For pdf output only 19 of these fonts are "required" in the same way, so some 
of the 35 fonts 
must be embedded in the pdf, which means  gropdf does need access to these 
fonts, even if they 
are named .t1.

> The question then, is where should we put them, not only for 'groff'  but
> also 'okular' or 'evince' or anything else which wants them?

I suspect many pdf viewers are using fontconfig to locate the fonts they need.

If you look at the centos package urw-base35-nimbus-roman-fonts which is a 
dependency of 
urw-base35-fonts which you installed, it contains this file:-

/etc/fonts/conf.d/61-urw-nimbus-roman.conf

Which tells fontconfig information about the NimbusRoman fonts. So if you use 
the centos 
packages to install the fonts, any program which uses fontconfig to locate 
fonts will be aware of 
their presence. Gropdf nor grops use fontconfig to find fonts, which is why you 
can use the --
with-urw-fonts-dir flag for configure.

Cheers 

Deri

> Stay safe - Damian