shared font directory

[Karl Berry]

      * psf   - PSF fonts

I'm not familiar with PSF.  Is this different than Type 1?

    Whenever fonts are installed into /usr/share/fonts, each
    post-installation script shall be executed.  

Executed by what?  (Just wondering.)

    For example, PostScript Type1 font files are usually stored directly
    under the type1 directory.

Well, here's the real crux of the matter.  Not in TeX, they're not.
Distributions these days seem to actually be converging, more or less,
to what we specified in the TDS, which is use a
<suppliername>/<familyname>/<fontname>.pf[ab]
substructure under each font type
(currently afm/ hbf/ ofm/ ovf/ ovp/ pfm/ pk/ source/ tfm/ ttf/ type1/ vf/)

It's a big pain to search that big tree, but I can't see abandoning it
now, nor can I see requiring other applications to search it.  It would
seem crazy for Ghostscript to put in all the effort to do recursive
searches, for example.  And yet, without that, I don't see how the fonts
are going to be shared.

>From time to time I've done things like automatically create a Fontmap
file for Ghostscript by running find on the recursive tree, but it was
never really all that reliable.


Also, there's the matter of dynamically-created fonts.  The document
seems to imply that they should be stored in /usr/lib/fonts, having a
parallel structure to /usr/share/fonts?


I assume both these /usr/*/fonts directories can be symlinks.  Otherwise
it's very problematic, since most sizable installations I'm aware of
store one or the other or both in network-wide mounted directories, not
locally on each machine.


Thanks for sending this along.  It's a worthy effort, I hope it can come
to fruition!

K