[tex-live] replacing ae with lm

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Tue May 12 02:27:05 CEST 2009


On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 8:02 PM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr> wrote:
> Robin Fairbairns a écrit :
>> 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.
>>
> What a pity, no cut&paste.

There is also the question of searching a document, either in a reader
or using google.

>>> 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...
>
> I tend to agree.
>
>> 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).
>>
> aeguill is still popular with some French users, namely those who never change
> unless the carpet is pulled away...

Often the same users who want to make pdf's from source files they wrote years
ago are upset when searches fail.

> Well, on one hand I think the tradition is to always preserve compatibility with
> older documents, on the other hand the cm-like font landscape is so complicated,
> every opportunity of simplifying it should probably be considered.

There have been massive changes elsewhere (unicode fonts, wide characters, etc)
to improve support for languages other than Western European.  People
need to be
able to create documents with passages, proper names, etc. in many languages.
When preserving compatibility makes it harder or even just different for users
outside the western hemisphere, there is nothing that will please everyone, so
a hard choice must be make and it is not a given that compatibility should win,
or even that spending time, effort, and space on compatibility should take
resources away from efforts to make TeX more useful for a wider audience.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


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