Using fonts from the LaTeX Font Catalogue

[Bob Tennent]

 >|> Paulo:  In what way is getnonfreefonts easier than doing
 >|>
 >|>   tlmgr install collection-fontsrecommended
 >|>   tlmgr install collection-fontsextra
 >|>
 >|> which are comparable to your proposed getanyfont?
 >|>
 >|
 >|Not at all. The domain of fonts is completely different. Not to mention
 >|that
 >|a LOT of source files and information on the LaTeX Font Catalogue is out
 >|of date and no longer works.

You misunderstood my question. Obviously the texlive
collections are disjoint from the set of fonts supported by
getnonfreefonts. But in your rant the only positive note was
your praise of getnonfreefonts and I was wondering why you
weren't happy with font installation in texlive.

None of your examples are supported by texlive so it's not
a surprise that they didn't work even in a complete texlive
system.

So I now understand that you're unhappy with installation
of font families *not* in texlive and *not* supported by
getnonfreefonts.  Also not really a surprise.

For example I looked at the emerald package at
https://ctan.org/pkg/emerald. The licence precludes
distribution in texlive. At the CTAN site one can find
a link to a zipped archive of the package which can be
downloaded and unzipped. As explained in the README, the
subdirectories

fonts
tex

should be copied to your personal texmf tree, say ~/texmf:

  cp -R fonts tex ~/texmf

The next instructions in the README are somewhat obsolete.
In current texlive, one updates the file database

  texhash ~/texmf 

and then executes

  updmap-user --enable Map emerald.map

You should then be ready to go with examples. Unfortunately,
there are no source examples in the archive, in particular
for the main documentation file emerald.pdf. Here is a small
example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{emerald}
\begin{document}
{\ECFMovieola A B C D E}
\end{document}

The command \ECFMovieola comes from emerald.sty.

I admit this is all clumsier than one would like. The
author should have supplied a TDS-compatible tree, should
be keeping the README up to date, and should have supplied
source examples. But CTAN are not willing to enforce such
requirements. Caveat emptor. TeXLive provides dozens of high
quality fonts and getnonfreefonts supports several more. If
you wander away from these, you'll have to learn to cope
with what's available.

 >|The MathTime Pro fonts are commercial and you cannot
 >|blame > the TeX community for any issues with their
 >|installation.
 >|
 >|There are both Commercial and Free versions. The Free
 >|version could easily be dealt with by "getnonfreefonts".

If so, you should suggest it to the maintainer.

 >|This is one of the reasons why the XeTeX/LuaTeX font
 >|handling is so nice -- from the point of view of the user
 >|-- it leaves your TL tree undisturbed.

The texmf tree you should be disturbing is your personal
tree ~/texmf, not the TeXLive dist tree.

Best,
Bob T.