[tex-live] Default font of pdflatex with latin1 characters

[Martin Monperrus]

Hi all,

pdflatex produces low-quality documents with the default settings. Let's
consider novice and intermediate users who write texts with accents (e.g.
French or German):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
à l'âge de la science, les systèmes techniques sont issus des découvertes.
\end{document}

If you try to copy/paste the resulting document, you obtain:
a a
` l'^ge de la science, les syst`mes techniques sont issus des d´couvertes
                               e                               e

The PDF file is of low quality:
* one can not search accented words in it
* one can not copy/paste accented words from it
* it can not be correctly indexed by search engines

I suggest that pdflatex should be configured to choose by default cm-super
or lmodern's versions of Computer Modern, without adding
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} & \usepackage{lmodern} or tweaking updmap.

Best regards,

--
Martin Monperrus
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