FS#10593 - [gsfonts] Nimbus Roman No9 L always appears bold

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Andrew Munkres (amunkres) - Thursday, 05 June 2008, 06:47 GMT
Last edited by Francois Charette (Firmicus) - Thursday, 25 March 2010, 20:45 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Jan de Groot (JGC)
Francois Charette (Firmicus)
Architecture x86_64
Severity Medium
Priority Normal
Reported Version 2007.08-2
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 2
Private No

Details

Description:
In KWord's font dialog box, for the Nimbus Roman No9 L font, the only two choices for "Font style" are Regular and Italic. Text in Nimbus Roman No9 L appears bold in both of these styles. I ran "pacman -Syu" today, and the problem is still present.

This seems similar to the bug described here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=278446

Additional info:
* package version(s)
gsfonts 8.11-4
koffice 1.6.3-3
qt3 3.3.8-7
fontconfig 2.5.0-1
* config and/or log files etc.
Attached is the .fonts.conf file from my home directory.

Steps to reproduce:
Run KWord, start a new document, type some text, change the font for the text to Nimbus Roman No9 L.
   .fonts.conf (0.8 KiB)
This task depends upon

Closed by  Francois Charette (Firmicus)
Thursday, 25 March 2010, 20:45 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Additional comments about closing:  See comments
Comment by Steven S (mintcoffee) - Wednesday, 23 July 2008, 02:21 GMT
I encountered this problem with fontconfig-ubuntu and poppler-qt4 using okular. Executing "fc-match Times" maps to the following:

n021004l.pfb: "Nimbus Roman No9 L" "Medium"

I'm no expert on how fontconfig works, but I believe the correct mapping should be to "Nimbus Roman No9 L" "Regular".
Comment by Steven S (mintcoffee) - Tuesday, 30 September 2008, 21:15 GMT
I've managed to fix this issue with the attached options in my .fonts.conf. Basically, it introduces the 'Regular" style as the default, then maps the bold styles to the Medium weight.

% fc-match "Nimbus Roman No9 L"
n021003l.pfb: "Nimbus Roman No9 L" "Regular"

% fc-match "Nimbus Roman No9 L:Bold"
n021004l.pfb: "Nimbus Roman No9 L" "Medium"

There seems to be something strange with the gsfonts or fontconfig detecting the Medium weight as the default..
   fonts-fix.conf (0.7 KiB)
Comment by César DE OLIVEIRA (6arts) - Friday, 20 March 2009, 14:57 GMT
Curently, i'm using KDE4.2. With kwords or open Office, I have a quite similar issue.

The bold font for the "Nimbus Roman No9 L" font is missing.
Comment by Roman Kyrylych (Romashka) - Saturday, 13 February 2010, 16:22 GMT
Not sure how we can fix this issue.
The URL to Debian's report doesn't work anymore.
@JGC: closing?
Comment by Paul Mattal (paul) - Saturday, 06 March 2010, 22:04 GMT
The debian thread seems to suggest this is a bug in the fonts (gsfonts), not relating to fontconfig, so I've added Francois, the gsfonts maintainer, to this bug.
Comment by Alex Viskovatoff (herzen) - Monday, 22 March 2010, 21:45 GMT
It is indeed a problem with gsfonts. The fonts in the Fedora package work. The solution is given at the end of this thread:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=93521

I suppose one can look at the spec file for the Fedora package to see how to build the Arch package to avoid this bug.
Comment by Francois Charette (Firmicus) - Tuesday, 23 March 2010, 21:01 GMT
The upstream maintainance of these fonts is a real mess. The gs-fonts project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gs-fonts/files/ is inactive since 2004. Since then the URW Type1 fonts themselves have been further developed and are available at http://svn.ghostscript.com/ghostscript/tags/urw-fonts-1.0.7pre44/, but these have never been officially released. Fortunately Fedora took the pain to package them properly, so I am tempted to repackage these fonts as "urw-fonts" (with "provides" and "replaces" gsfonts) and take the sources directly from Fedora: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=138570. Probably I should take the upstream version number however (1.0.7pre44) instead of the one used by Fedora (2.4-9.fc13).
@Paul + @JGC: Would that be an acceptable solution?

Note that I don't use these fonts that much any more. I prefer the TeX-Gyre fonts (http://tug.ctan.org/cgi-bin/ctanPackageInformation.py?id=tex-gyre), which are based on the URW fonts but with many many more glyphs and improvements. They are provided by the package texlive-core ;)
Comment by Francois Charette (Firmicus) - Thursday, 25 March 2010, 20:45 GMT
OK, I decided against renaming the pkg. But I've added "provides=(urw-fonts)" to the PKGBUILD.
Just released the new pkg, so I'm closing this now.

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