Follow-up Comment #25, bug #65974 (group groff):

At 2025-10-15T17:49:48-0400, Deri James wrote:
> Follow-up Comment #24, bug #65974 (group groff):
>
> More distributions are likely to drop installing afm files, now that
> postscript is no longer supported. Ghostscript has not needed them for
> years since the meta-data in the afm files is baked into the
> executable. The reason we need them is because our font files only
> contain the information for the original 257 glyphs defined for the
> the original postscript language. Current URW fonts have a much larger
> glyph repertoire, which is why we need the corresponding afm files so
> that afmtodit can generate the appropriate groff fonts to create the
> U- fonts which have cyrillic and other glyphs not present in our
> standard fonts.

Reasonable.  This sounds like information we should have in our
documentation somewhere.  Maybe once distributors can more easily
discover these facts (because we tell them), they might reconsider
their decision to not package the AFM files; they can then have their
_groff_ packages depend on whatever package provides those files.

> Gropdf supports our standard fonts (i.e. TR), reduced to the base 14
> fonts if the type 1 fonts are not found, and the URW fonts (i.e. U-TR)
> if the urw-fonts AND the afm files are found. So in the case of Arch
> the full 35 standard fonts would be available (since the .t1 fonts are
> found through scraping gs -h) but not the 35 extra U- fonts (because
> the afm files are lacking).

Understood.  I think.  ;-)

>> Deri, what do you think?
>
> First, maybe it is a mistake to make this warning critical, i.e. abort
> the build run. Perhaps the better option may be to suppress the
> individual message and report at the end that only the standard fonts
> are available.

Well, if we detect the issue at "configure" time, we can warn then.  We
already have a similar message; maybe we can adapt a new one for the
case where URW font files proper are found but their AFM auxiliaries are
not.

https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/m4/groff.m4?id=15ab324cdbf9a727094a8385e6d902077405ff6e#n388

> Also, I think we need a conversation on where we want to go with the
> future of groff with fonts. Some of this is mentioned in bug #60930.

My plan for right now is to ship either Peter's script or your stuff in
comment #23 to bug #60930 (I need to look it over) in some kind of
examples directory and make reference to it from the _gropdf_(1) man
page.

I think a desirable future is to have OTF and TTF font support in
_grops_ and _gropdf_.  Granted, that's a non-negligible amount of work.



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