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It seems like the times package is having difficulty not being used.

The pack­age is now ob­so­lete, re­placed by the math­ptmx pack­age, which sup­ports Times Ro­man text and (mostly) match­ing math­e­mat­ics.

of course mathptmx is also deprecated

The pack­age is part of psnfss, but is reck­oned to be ob­so­lete. Users are rec­om­mended to switch to us­ing newtx in its place.

I look in formatting guidelines for CS conference papers. And so often they say make sure to \usepackage{times}. I normally ignore it, because often the conference is just reusing old instructions from many years earlier.

But today I was reading instructions that clearly were updated for the current year, and it still instructed to \usepackage{times}.

My questions are:

  • Will anyone actually be able to tell if I use newtx, instead of times ?
  • Is it worth writing to conference organizers asking the to amend their guidelines.
  • if so is there an authoritative statement (that is more substantial than the paragraph on CTAN) saying that it is deprecated and why?
  • Is it better to wait until after a conference has occurred that gave the time recommendation, then contact the organizers of the next year's conference?
Frames Catherine White
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  • I'm not sure if this is a better fit for Academi stack exchange or here. – Frames Catherine White Jun 10 '17 at 04:04
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    I don't know if it is on topic but it's a good question in general, not only for times package. As a beginner I think to inform on CTAN is not enough. May be have an "obsolete" warning when compiled and when inquired with texdoc should be useful. – CarLaTeX Jun 10 '17 at 04:24
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    Can't we modify times such that it simply loads math­ptmx? – Uwe Ziegenhagen Jun 10 '17 at 05:52
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    @UweZiegenhagen times and mathptmx have different behaviour. It is imho not okay to change this. If someone uses times it is his choice and one shouldn't secretly try to educate him. – Ulrike Fischer Jun 10 '17 at 07:34
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    It's not possible to modify either times or mathptmx, because so many old documents were legitimately using them. – egreg Jun 10 '17 at 08:24
  • res.cls shouldn't be used anymore as well, but google sees it as a good result. Same here. – Johannes_B Jun 10 '17 at 08:57
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    @egreg They could be modified to give warnings, though, as long as the typeset result doesn't change. – cfr Jun 10 '17 at 13:44
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    Part of this question is off-topic here, I think e.g. the bit about telling conference organisers would be better on Academia SE. Can you edit this question to focus on the TeX aspect and ask a linked question there about the academia parts? – cfr Jun 10 '17 at 13:46
  • What about the new "libertinust1math" package? its purpose is to be used with Libertine font: "The package provides a Type1 version of Libertinus Math, with a number of additions and changes, plus LaTeX support files that allow it to serve as a math accompaniment to Libertine under LaTeX." – jotagah Jun 13 '17 at 20:35
  • @cft which dot points should stay here and which should go? I'm thinking 1 & 3, stay here, and 2 & 4 move to Academia.SE. And the introductory paragraph is same on both, and I add a link to the partner question on both? – Frames Catherine White Jun 14 '17 at 03:06
  • newtx looks a bit different from times font. Sometimes it's specifically stated that times font should be used. – prab4th Nov 07 '17 at 20:03
  • I just asked this question on the TeXlive mailing list. -- Let's see what comes out of it. https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2018-February/041007.html – Nico Schlömer Feb 02 '18 at 18:59
  • @NicoSchlömer tex-live isn't really the right place they can only ship what is on ctan, and ctan can only distribute what the authors supply, so you would have to persuade a package author to put a warning in a package (which would not be appropriate for times.sty as it happens) – David Carlisle Feb 02 '18 at 19:10
  • @DavidCarlisle Indeed. Perhaps this will lead to a discussion who is responsible for a certain piece of code once the author is no longer maintaining the package (for whatever reason). Let's see. – Nico Schlömer Feb 02 '18 at 19:13
  • @NicoSchlömer the discussion seems somewhat presumptuous to be honest. The package has a maintainer listed, is there any reason to suppose it isn't maintained, or that "waiting to see" rather than contacting the maintainer is the best course of action. In the case of times I think it most likely has not changed as no change is required. – David Carlisle Feb 02 '18 at 19:17
  • @DavidCarlisle Sorry for the confusion. The listed maintainer Se­bas­tian Rahtz deceased about two years ago. If someone has taken over in the meantime, it's of course best to contact that person before. – Nico Schlömer Feb 02 '18 at 19:23
  • @NicoSchlömer I knew Sebastian well and attended his funeral, look at the ctan page https://ctan.org/pkg/psnfss?lang=en Walter took over from Sebastian over a decade ago – David Carlisle Feb 02 '18 at 19:25
  • @DavidCarlisle Thanks for the pointer! I had been looking at https://ctan.org/pkg/times?lang=en. – Nico Schlömer Feb 02 '18 at 19:27
  • My queston is, why are conferences in Computer Science stuck in the Twentieth Century? Is this some sort of Y2K problem that has never been resolved? Have they ever heard of Unicode? Open Type? –  Feb 05 '18 at 22:55
  • @RobtAll — this is not just conferences in CS. Many engineering conferences also provide LaTeX templates but tend to use "hand me down" class files that sometimes date back decades. – Will Robertson Feb 05 '18 at 23:06

1 Answers1

9

The original motivation for the psnfss packages such as times was to use the fonts built in to the new PostScript laser printers. So times package selects (or at least selected) Adobe (licenced from Linotype) Times Roman. Apart from giving the look of Times Roman this had the distinct advantage at the time as the generated PostScript files were much smaller as they had no fonts embedded.

The newtxtext package selects a Times Roman clone, TeX Gyre Termes.

Normally packages selecting different fonts would not be considered to be the same, or one deprecated in terms of the other.

The situation here is complicated though as (with no change to the TeX macros of the times package) most TeX distributions now set the default map files for Times Roman to not use the built in Times Font but rather embed a Times clone (the Nimbus font originally donated by URW to the ghostscript project). The TeX Gyre Times Roman clone is also based on the glyphs in this URW font, so the differences between the fonts are not as large as they might be.

However to answer the question

Will anyone actually be able to tell if I use newtx, instead of times ?

Then yes depending how they look:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{newtxtext}
%\usepackage{times}
\begin{document}

zzz
\end{document}

Depending which package is used, pdffonts info shows

PKIZXQ+TeXGyreTermes-Regular         Type 1            Custom

or

VXPZSB+NimbusRomNo9L-Regu            Type 1            Custom

If you just use times package, then any mathematics will be set in the default computer modern and look very light in comparison, so the close cousin of the times package mathptm(x) soon followed. Unlike the text case, the constraints of using virtual fonts to access fonts built in to a 1980's laser printer, plus fonts available in a 1980s tex distribution fonts mean that in comparison to later math fonts for TeX, mathptm is rather, hmm basic (and mathptmx only slightly less so). However you can not just switch an existing document to a different font setup as the metrics are different and all line and page breaking would change, so it would not be appropriate to withdraw these packages or even really make them give warnings, however for new documents newtxmath will certainly give better math setting in general.

Is it worth writing to conference organizers asking the to amend their guidelines.

Possibly, possibly not. The organisers probably have other things to worry about. Also they may have some agreement with a publisher for the conference proceedings, so they may be constrained to whatever requirements they have for publishing (and publisher classes can be very strange:-)

So your next question

if so is there an authoritative statement (that is more substantial than the paragraph on CTAN) saying that it is deprecated and why?

Not really, ctan has lots of packages in lots of states of maintenance or lack of maintenance. The users need to determine if any packages they use are suitable for the use at hand, there is no review and no authority that can make such a statement.

and finally

Is it better to wait until after a conference has occurred that gave the time recommendation, then contact the organizers of the next year's conference?

As for the previous question, it may be worth mentioning it, but next years organisers might have the same internal constraints as this years.

David Carlisle
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