[XeTeX] Xetex won't compile without Lmodern fonts

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

The "Latin Modern" (lmodern) fonts are the result of an effort by several TeX User Groups in Europe to provide a consistent set of LaTeX fonts. The Computer Modern fonts were designed with the somewhat limited capabilities of older hardware in mind. A set of PostScript fonts has been available for a while, but these fonts (apparently) are not complete enough to set all languages based on the latin alphabets (Polish, Lithuanian, Vietnamese etc - languages with special characters and a lot of accents).

Thus the so-called TeX-Gyre fonts, of which Latin Modern is one, provides a systematic re-implementation of the most popular latex-fonts. The fontspec package, unless instructed otherwise, will default to latin modern, so yes, lmodern is probably required to use xelatex + fontspec.

Package maintainers are free to include the TeX-Gyre fonts or not. By the way, in my opinion LaTeX + related is one of the packages for which it is generally better to not rely on the package maintainers of a linux distribution. Latex is a very complex set of interrelated softwares, packages, etc, and TeXLive is an excellent, and easily installed and maintained, package which is best installed by hand.

Cheerio,
Wilfred 

--- On Fri, 16/4/10, Raphael Frey <freyraphael at lavabit.com> wrote:

> From: Raphael Frey <freyraphael at lavabit.com>
> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Xetex won't compile without Lmodern fonts
> To: xetex at tug.org
> Date: Friday, 16 April, 2010, 5:56 PM
> On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:22:31 -0500
> Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Try the [cm-default] option for fontspec. Also, I'd
> put the fontspec
> > line before the xunicode line but I'm not sure it
> makes a difference.
> 
> Thank you and Peter Dyballa for your help and informaitons.
> The problem
> was (and still is) that the ‘texlive-xetex’ package in
> Debian (stable
> and unstable) has no dependency to the ‘lmodern’
> package – ‘lmodern’ is
> not even a recommendation of the ‘texlive-xetex’
> package. But it seems
> that this problem now gets fixed soon. I supposed that the
> Latin Modern
> fonts are as important to Xetex documents as the Computer
> Modern fonts
> to Tex/Latex documents but I was not 100 % sure –
> therefore I asked
> here. (And I neglected to consult the documentation of the
> ‘fontspec’
> package.)
> 
> Best regards
> 
> Raphael
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>   http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
> 

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com