[OS X TeX] cmss vs. \sfdefault font question

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 8 août 06 à 01:09, Gary L. Gray a écrit :

> Something came up today that has me perplexed. I have a document  
> that I created in January that uses:
>
> \renewcommand{\familydefault}{cmss}
>
> to make everything sans serif. When typeset in January, it looked  
> great and all nice Postscript fonts were used. I just tried  
> typesetting it and it took forever as mf had to create all the  
> fonts. When it was done, it looked terrible (all bitmapped fonts).  
> I did a quick search on the list and found this command:
>
> \renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}
>
> which worked perfectly.
>
> My question is, what in LaTeX has changed? Why did cmss work 7  
> months ago and why does it not work now?

Hi Gary,

Is this all on the same computer? IIRC you got a MacBook Pro earlier  
this year, is it possible that cmss was working on your former  
computer and is no longer working on your current computer? If so,  
that would be a configuration problem.

Both commands yield the same output on my setup. I'm not sure what's  
the TeX code to get the definition of a command written to the log  
(and I've no TeXbook around), could it be \the\sfdefault? What does  
it yield for you? Also, doesn't (for example) /usr/local/teTeX/share/ 
texmf.local/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map contain lines like:

cmss10 CMSS10 <cmss10.pfb

As just pointed out by Herb Schultz as I'm writing this, it might  
also be a matter of T1 vs. OT1 vs. LY1 encodings, of the presence or  
not of CM-Super, of use or not of the lmodern package, etc.

Bruno------------------------- Info --------------------------
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