[tex-live] replacing ae with lm

Dan Luecking luecking at uark.edu
Mon May 11 20:31:20 CEST 2009


>
>Karl Berry 
><<http://www.tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2009-May/http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-live>karl 
>at freefriends.org> wrote:
>
> > I'm not deeply conversant with the AE fonts, but I recall that we had a
> > general plan of replacing them with LM via fontmap entries.  Is this
> > feasible?  Is LM a truly compatible replacement for them?
>
>i'm not "deeply conversant" with ae, either, but i used to use them
>regularly.
>
>i doubt there will be any usability issues in replacing them with lm.

I suppose future TeX Live will always contain LM, but certainly not all
TeX distributions carry it by default.

The ae distribution (as I understand it) uses virtual fonts to get
most of the T1 encoding from the CM fonts. It does this by making
accented characters look to TeX like single characters, but obtains
them by composing the plain letters with accent characters.

There seems no advantage to using lm over cm for this purpose, unless
one changes the virtual fonts so that they access accented characters
directly. In that case, a user doesn't really need ae, but could simply
use the ec or lm fonts directly with fontenc.
So my question is: why bother?

Dan

Daniel H. Luecking
Department of Mathematical Sciences
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701 



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