Maybe this is off topic, but I haven't found the
psnfss' mailing list.
Anyway, I think this email is not so bad (or I hope).


Subject:  avant.sty like helvet.sty

On the last page of the manual psnfss2e.pdf there is
the sample sentence:

    'D'ont use Avant Garde for typesetting
     larger portions of text!'.

I absolutely don't agree with that!
(The problem could be only the size of the font, like
Helvetica, but that problem is solvable, as I suggest)

It is sufficient to typeset just a page of text with
the Avant Garde font, and to print it with a good printer,
to convince oneself that the Avant Garde font is a very
beautiful font.
This is not only a personal opinion: there are lots of
books typesetted with the Avant Garde font that you can
buy in bookstores, at least in Italy, wehere I live.

I typesetted my master thesys using Avant Garde
(scaled in size) as main font, Helvetica (scaled) as sans
serif font, and Computer Modern as math font.
Also, I used Bitstream Charter to typeset the tiltes
of chapters and sections.

Taking the files helvet.sty and *phv.fd as templates,
I wrote a simple package myavant.sty, and I modified the
*pag.fd files, to match the size of the Avant Garde font
to the size of the Computer modern math fonts.
Actually, the scaling is fixed, while the helvet package
use the keyval package to allow user variable scaling factor.
Maybe it's simple, but I don't know if it is, and now I
haven't the time to study the keyval package.

So I hope that in the next release, the PSNFSS team will
provide the package avant.sty with the same 'rights'
of the package helvet.sty.

Antonio Quercia