finding fonts for gropdf at groff build time (was: groff 1.24.0.rc1 on Manjaro 23)

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:10:12 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260120171012.73tofefp2cpj33xe@illithid>

[this message might be too "inside baseball" for Bruno's interest]

At 2026-01-20T13:48:52+0000, Deri wrote:
> First, a little introduction on how gropdf interacts with fonts. There
> are 3 different service levels:-
> 
> A) Full service
[...]
> B) Intermediate service
[...]
> C) Basic service
[...]
> The program BuildFoundries understands these 3 service levels and
> outputs a warning when it discovers issues which detract from
> providing a full service.

Worth noting is that the groff build doesn't install the
"BuildFoundries" script; it lives only in the source tree.  This is an
important fact for distributors, or anybody using gropdf (directly or
indirectly) who didn't build groff from source themselves.

> A change in this release is that warnings from BuildFoundries now
> abort the build, which essentially means that you must have all the
> URW fonts (and their afm files) available in order to have a
> successful build.

I'll wear the blame for this.  Several different things can go wrong
that prevent a build from getting to "full service", and the many
possible scenarios are laborious for me to test for.  The problems
arising therefrom were driving me crazy.  So I hit the problem with a
hammer, and the build freaks out if the slightest thing goes wrong.

The bad news is that, often enough, a slight (or chunky) thing will go
wrong when the build tries to locate the URW fonts or their metrrics.

The good news is that, if the build doesn't fail, you can be pretty
confident that gropdf will work at the full service level.

(All bets are off if you rearrange your file system subsequently to move
the URW fonts where gropdf can't find them, though.  Typically, system
users don't do this--but distros and their packaging systems do![1])

I begin to perceive that for rc2 and the 1.24.0 final release, I need to
advertise the importance of configuring the desired URW support
situation.  Do we need a "--without-urw-fonts" "./configure" option?

Regards,
Branden

[1] This is why our canned URW font search path grows ever longer...

    https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/m4/groff.m4?h=1.24.0.rc1#n342

    ...and why to solve the eternally vexing third-party font support
    problem, we need to provide scripts that packaging systems can
    integrate with their "triggers", reconfiguring groff's view of font
    availability as font packages get installed and removed from the
    system.  This issue is not, at present, filed as a Savannah ticket.

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