The description of urw-fonts says that it contains the 35 standard
postscript (as on a laserwriter) fonts:

  Description :
  Free, good quality versions of the 35 standard PostScript(TM) fonts,
  donated under the GPL by URW++ Design and Development GmbH.  The
  fonts.dir file font names match the original Adobe names of the fonts
  (e.g., Times, Helvetica, etc.).

but that simply isn't true on SL30x (or I assume RHEL3), 'cos the
fonts.dir file it generated (in the %postinstall), doesn't contain the
right names.

grep -i times /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/fonts.dir 

shows nothing.  In the specfile of an older version of urw-fonts the
fonts.scale file from the tarfile is placed into %fontdir and
mkfontdir is run.  The current specfile does a mkfontscale which just
generates the fonts.scale file from data in the .pfb files and those
names in the fonts themselves.

e.g. n021003l.pfb is "Nimbus Roman No9", so the fonts.dir (on my
systems) now contains:

$ egrep -i n021003l.pfb /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/fonts.scale
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-3
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-4
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-5
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-9
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-10
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-e
n021003l.pfb -urw-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1

whereas the fonts.scale from the tarfile contains:

$ egrep -i n021003l.pfb fonts.scale
n021003l.pfb -URW-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
n021003l.pfb -URW-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2
n021003l.pfb -URW-Times-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
n021003l.pfb -URW-Times-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2
n021003l.pfb -URW-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-r
n021003l.pfb -URW-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-u
n021003l.pfb -URW-Times-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-r
n021003l.pfb -URW-Times-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-u
n021003l.pfb -URW-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-microsoft-cp1251
n021003l.pfb -URW-Times-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-microsoft-cp1251
n021003l.pfb -URW-Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15
n021003l.pfb -URW-Times-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15

the encodings differ but also the font-names are (all) different,
since we have case differences and this version lists Times as well.

Are we supposed to have a scalable Times (and Palatino etc) from some
other font package?  If so which one?  I seem to have managed to get a
set of fonts which only has bitmap versions of Times (etc) available.

Changing the urw-fonts specfile to copy the tarfile version of
fonts.scale will probably work, but is ugly and won't include all the
right encodings.  Does anyone have any better suggestions?

Perhaps a fonts.alias will allow the right set of mappings but I can't
quite see how/where to do that...

It looks like the change (to no longer using the fonts.scale provided
in the Package) happened in 2003, the changelog entry:

* Tue Jun 10 2003 Owen Taylor <[log in to unmask]> 2.1-1
- Upgrade to upstream version 1.0.7pre22
- Massive cleanups to fonts.dir/fonts.scale handling (use mkfontscale
  instead of fonts.scale from the package, etc.)

but surely we still want the ames like Times.  Or maybe my mkfontscale
is broken (where *should* it get those names etc from?)

 -- Jon