[Pkg-fonts-devel] Creating independent packages for OpenType math fonts?

[Frédéric WANG]

Dear all,

Debian has several packages containing fonts with an OpenType MATH
table. These fonts are used by some TeX engines and are often strongly
connected to TeX packages. However, they are also used by some Web
engines: For example, they are recommended for MathML in Gecko 31 and
higher [1] and WebKit. Actually, the issue about the lack of an
independent package for Latin Modern has recently been discussed on the
webkit-dev mailing list [2].  Of course, other applications (say,
LibreOffice) could in theory use them to render mathematical expressions...

Hence it would make sense to have Debian packages independent from the
TeX packages. That's the case for two of these font families (Asana and
STIX which are included into fonts-oflb-asana-math and fonts-stix
respectively). For others, I noticed that:

1) Some of them (Latin Modern, TeX Gyre Bonum, TeX Gyre Pagella, TeX
Gyre Schola, TeX Gyre Termes) have a separate packages (fonts-lmodern
and fonts-texgyre) but for some reason they still depend on tex-common.

2) Others (Libertinus, XITS) are included inside the texlive-fonts-extra
package and so you can not install them without also installing various
TeX stuff.

So I wonder whether there is any plan to package these fonts
independently from TeX? Do any TeX/font maintainers have something
against this idea?

Thanks,

Frédéric Wang

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/MathML_Project/Fonts
[2] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2016-March/028068.html


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