[tex-live] replacing ae with lm

[Robin Fairbairns]

Dan Luecking <luecking at uark.edu> wrote:

> > 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.

so they behave well at acrorubbish render time.

as far as i know, none of the mapping applications can deal with
virtually composed fonts, so cut&paste of documents using ae will never
work.

> 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?

simply to get away from virtual fonts.  there are those who will never
change unless the carpet is pulled away from under them...  though i
note no-one mentions dumping aeguill, which iirc used at one time to be
popular with the french and others who use guillemets (or one of adobe's
auk-family birds).

robin