lmodern fonts and sarge
Hi,
Considering the potential of a sarge release coming "soon", I would like
to hear about the status of lmodern (Latin Modern, AKA lm) fonts in
Debian.
Why is the current status... suboptimal?
----------------------------------------
The fact is that neither cm-super nor lmodern fonts are in Debian at the
moment, although these fonts are the cleanest way for French users and I
believe, most (latin) european users as well, to generate PDF files with
T1-encoded Type 1 fonts of the Computern Modern family[1] (which, also
it appears to be a very special case from this description, is the most
common setting wanted by new users for typesetting of latin languages[2]
with PDFTeX).
So, as it is now, a Debian (or bare) teTeX user who starts a LaTeX
document with:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
(and no font-selecting package such as times, txfonts, pxfonts, fourier,
etc. following in the preamble)
and runs it through pdflatex will generate a PDF file that looks very
ugly when viewed with Acrobat Reader because:
- the selected fonts will be the EC fonts;
- the EC fonts (T1 encoding) are only available as Type 3;
- Acrobat Reader is very bad at displaying Type 3 fonts.
How does lmodern help with this problem?
----------------------------------------
As of now, there are, to the best of my knowledge, two sets of fonts
that extend the original Computer Modern fonts to european character
sets and are available as Type 1 in the T1 encoding: these are cm-super
and lmodern.[3]
An ITP was filed[4] for cm-super one year and 347 days ago (yes, you
read it right), which never led to the package entering Debian.
In the meantime, the situation evolved and lmodern fonts were created.
People who are more knowledgeable than me about fonts say that lmodern
fonts are of a much better quality than cm-super. Also, lmodern fonts
are waaaaay smaller than cm-super:
-rw-r--r-- 1 flo users 66926990 Oct 24 15:28 cm-super.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 flo users 4851567 Jan 26 12:59 lm.tar.gz
So, at least for the people typesetting in French, lmodern seems to be
the way to go now.
>From 0info086.txt in the lm.tar.gz file above:
The Latin Modern fonts can be freely used and distributed under the
GNU Public Licence (see
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php).
so, inclusion of the fonts in Debian should not be a problem from a
legal point of view (yeah, right, "GNU Public Licence" really means "GNU
General Public Licence" here).
lmodern and Debian
------------------
In August 2003, Michael Wiedmann made a Debian package[5] for lmodern
fonts (the package was first called lm, then renamed to lmodern). It was
not included in Debian, presumably because it was thought[6] the lmodern
fonts would be part of the next teTeX release. Unfortunately, this
release does not appear to be imminent[7] and it would anyway probably
be a bad idea to try to roll out a new teTeX in unstable right now.
As a consequence, the lmodern fonts are not in Debian. It would be
really better for many european TeX users if we could have them in sarge
however.
I didn't test Michael's package and therefore am not in a position to
recommend it for unstable without further consideration. Also, [5] does
not mention where we could get the source pacakge and several things
could be improved in the binary package.
I would like to know the teTeX maintainers plan about this issue. I
don't have a lot of time available for the next month but I can surely
come up with a decent package pretty soon (and maintain it if someone
sponsors me for the task) if that is required for lmodern fonts to be
included in sarge.
Thanks for your attention.
[1] Well, extended with accented characters and such, which is why they
are not called Computer Modern anymore, AFAIUI.
[2] This possibly applies to more european languages, but I am not
knowledgeable enough about these to claim it.
[3] Before the availability of cm-super, packages like aeguill were used
to mix the CM Type 1 fonts [not in T1 encoding!] and other fonts to
get some of the missing chars, which was not as complete as the
current solutions AFAIK and a bit of a kludge, anyway.
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=133649
[5] http://www.miwie.org/lm/
[6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-tetex-maint/2003/debian-tetex-maint-200308/msg00100.html
[7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-tetex-maint/2004/debian-tetex-maint-200401/msg00077.html
--
Florent
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