https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1496466

--- Comment #13 from David Kaspar [Dee'Kej] dkaspar@redhat.com --- (In reply to Nicolas Mailhot from comment #10)

That's a poor situation to be in, but yes the minimum would be to ship the OpenType¹ versions as required by Fedora packaging guidelines, and maybe hide somewhere the Type1/AFM versions for GS private use (after asking Fesco). The first priority would be to avoid Ghostscript blocking progress in other apps that want to use those fonts. If that can help you in any way, you have my blessing, for the little it is worth.

I'm OK to ship it all together (i.e. *.t1 living next to *.otf), in order for the fonts to have the same file path (I would like to avoid creating a symlinks in that folder). The reason why we now need the Type1 to be living in that exact folder name is that ImageMagick has just added support for 'urw-base35-fonts' and it is expecting the Type1 fonts in that specific location:

https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/commit/fbca0d09324006b66b01e

(I forgot to mention that there are other packages still depending on the Type1 format - ImageMagick is the one of them, and AFAICT there are others.)

As an aside I understand the reluctance of Ghostscript upstream to switch from "proven" Type1 fonts but let's be honest, Ghostscript is fed all kinds of stuff by third-party apps, the Type1 support of those apps is going away, they *will* preferentially use OpenType files, so long term there will be all sorts of subtle discrepancies between a Ghostscript that understands URW as "Type1", and the rest of the world that thinks "Opentype". But that's typically a "choose your poison" situation for the Ghostscript maintainer, it need not impact the rest of the distro the way it does now.

You're getting to the core of the problem here actually. As I mentioned before, Ghostscript upstream does not want to switch to OTF/TTF, because one of their "devices" (inside of Ghostscript called 'pdfwrite', used for conversions, etc.) would not work in quite few scenarios (I had some bug reports about it before IIRC), thus making the PS->PDF and PDF->PS conversions not working.

So as the rest of the World is slowly starting to use the OTF/TTF, the Ghostscript is using Type1 fonts (converted from the OTF files actually), and they most likely will be doing it for a long time to come. That's because they are bundling the Type1 fonts with the Ghostscript vanilla sources, so they do not need to care about the rest of the World going with OTF.

And that's because of the FPG that we actually ship a separate package for these fonts (because FPG forbids bundling of software, unless there is an exception from FESco). And that's why many other distros IMHO do not face these problems, because they do not care so much about bundling the software - they built it from vanilla sources (with a lots of other bundled libraries, etc.) and just ship it. When this happens, they can have both OTF fonts and Type1 fonts living next to each other. (Type1 is being shipped as part of Ghostscript's resources.)

Looking at the sizes of the OTF and TTF, the OTF seems to be "compressed", therefore in order to save users' space, I would again vote for using this format.

So to conclude, I will take this to a FESco, but I need to find out how to do this officially first. And I'm currently being under time pressure both from my primary job responsibilities and F27 release schedule - because the process of putting this package into F27 is already underway, and I can't stop it anymore - other packages are currently depending on it as well.

In this case, I will probably take the way of "EAFP" instead of "LBYL", make the changes ASAP, and then inform FESco about this and "ask for forgiveness"... :D