[OS X TeX] Documents less legible with T1 font encoding
Bruno Voisin
bvoisin at mac.com
Fri Aug 5 19:48:26 CEST 2005
Le 5 août 05 à 19:27, Armin Goralczyk a écrit :
> So to get this clear (I am a little bit confused): T1 hyphenates
> words with accents or umlauts correct, but CM-Super and Latin
> Modern differ?! Why is that? Does that mean CM-Super and/or Latin
> Modern hyphenation is incorrect or not optimal?
I do not think the rules of hyphenation differ in CM-Super and Latin
Modern, these do not depend on the font directly.
With the standard CM fonts, the accented characters do not exist as
such: they are composites, built at the time a TeX document is
typeset, by combining accent characters with non-accented letters.
For example, é is in fact the composite e + ´. It is input through a
command \'e, so that for example the French word anémie (anaemia)
would be entered as an\'emie. Alas: TeX cannot hyphenate words
containing commands; as a consequence, any word containing an
accented letter cannot be hyphenated at all as long as CM fonts are
used.
However, the babel package introduces some trickery, such that a word
containing a command is separated in two parts, which can each be
hyphenated individually, yielding possible hyphenation either before
or after the accent. This is better, but not optimal yet, as not all
possible break points will be found, and those that are found are not
necessarily correct.
With T1 fonts, on the contrary, and assuming you use the inputenc
package with the correct encoding, you are both (1) entering accented
letters as letters on your keyboard (like é), thanks to the inputenc
package, avoiding the resort to commands, and (2) getting output in
which the accented letters are individual characters (like é), thanks
to the fontenc package and to the installation of the appropriate
fonts. And your hyphenation points are finally correct!
Regarding CM-Super and Latin Modern, the difference has another
origin: the metrics of the two font sets are very subtly different.
This means that the width of each letter, and the amount of white
space between letters, is very slightly different between the two
sets. As a consequence, it may happen that the word to be hyphenated
at the end of a line in a long paragraph is different when either set
is used, yielding different hyphenated words. However, the
hyphenation rules and algorithm in the two cases should be exactly
the same.
Bruno Voisin--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
& FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>
More information about the macostex-archives
mailing list