[tex-live] oddities with the bbold fonts

[Robin Fairbairns]

Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner at web.de> wrote:

> Both tetex and texlive contain:
> 
> support files and fonts for bbold:
> * bbold.sty and Ubbold.fd in TEXMF/tex/latex/bbold
> * sources and tfms in TEXMF/fonts/source/public/bbold and
>   TEXMF/fonts/tfm/public/bbold
> 
> support files for sauter extension of bbold fonts:
> * mathbbol.sty and ubbold.fd TEXMF/tex/latex/jknappen
> 
> Only tetex contains the needed font sources for the sauter extension of
> bbold fonts in TEXMF/fonts/sources/jknappen/sauter.
> 
> Therefore simple files making use of these fonts fail on texlive:
> 
> \documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article}
> \usepackage{mathbbol}
> \begin{document}
> $\mathbb{R C}$
> $\Eins$
> \end{document}
> 
> I think the missing fonts can be found on CTAN:fonts/cm/sauter/addons/.
> However, I am not sure if one should add these fonts or remove the LaTeX
> support files from texlive.

no comment.  i would suggest the fonts are sensible candidates for
optional extras, but i'm not au fait with how these decisions are made.

> In addition, I am wondering why this is working on tetex at all, given
> that we have both ubbold.fd and Ubbold.fd. I allways thought that the
> case for the encoding part in fd-files is optional.

actually, not really.  the standard is for lower-case; however
upper-case files are accepted as well.  so, if nfss fails to find
ubbold.fd, then and only then will it look for Ubbold.fd for
compatibility reasons, but it won't look for them simultaneously or
anything.  (this is why the encoding file name always comes out with
uppercased encoding in error messages.)

robin