Subject: Re: bug#73161: 29.4; Exporting Org Agenda to PDF with Cyrillic Characters

From: Serghei Iakovlev <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2024 14:02:50 +0200

> IMO, Org should document that org-agenda-write uses ps-print and
> ps2pdf, so that users could know where to look for cause of trouble
> and which parts to customize to work around these problems.

I agree with you.  Things would have been a bit simpler, and perhaps
even friendlier, if I had stumbled upon this information right away.
I'd like to take this opportunity to address Ihor and kindly ask him
to consider reviewing and enhancing the documentation related to this
matter.

> When you unpack the tarball, chdir to the intlfonts-1.2.1 created by
> unpacking, and type:
>
>   $ make bdf INSTALLDIR=/path/to/where/to/install
>
> This should install the BDF fonts in the specified directory, and you
> should point bdf-directory-list to it.  (You can delete the
> intlfonts-1.2.1 tree after you do the above.)

Looks like it works something like this:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
% ./configure --prefix=~/.local
creating cache ./config.cache
checking for a BSD compatible install... /opt/homebrew/bin/ginstall -c
checking where fonts should go... ~/.local/share/emacs/fonts
checking whether to compress fonts or not... no
checking installing font types...  pcf bdf
updating cache ./config.cache
creating ./config.status
creating Makefile
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

and then just:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
% make bdf
% ls -1 ~/.local/share/emacs/fonts/bdf | wc -l
     137
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

> And finally: the situation with ps-print wrt non-ASCII text is not a
> good one.  Even if BDF fonts still work, they are somewhat ugly, and
> are nowadays almost unsupported by systems, so it is hard to find nice
> BDF fonts.  And ps-mule doesn't support anything else.  There were
> plans to write ps-type1 to support Type1 fonts, but it never happened.

Oh my, they are indeed hideous! I suspected you were being quite
diplomatic by calling them "somewhat ugly," but I had no idea just
how bad they actually were!  It’s honestly so awful that my manager
would rather not know my weekly status than read it with these fonts

Jokes aside, the second thing I’d like to propose is to start a
discussion about reviving the Type1 font support project.  This seems
like an important and mature step forward, considering we’re in the
21st century, and the era of display resolutions reminiscent of a
microwave OLED screen is long behind us.

> Unfortunately, this basically means that any Lisp program that builds
> on ps-print will only reasonably support ASCII and Latin-1 text, the
> rest of scripts will need to use BDF fonts, and will probably not look
> very nice.  IMO, Org should document this limitation as well.

I'm curious how feasible it would be to extend Org to rework the PDF
generation flow, for example, to something like Org -> TeX -> PDF,
similar to how pandoc handles it.  This is my second question
addressed to Ihor.

> HTH, and sorry for your journey down this rabbit hole.

Thank you for your explanations and kind words of support—I really
appreciate it.

-- 
Serghei Iakovlev