Bug#348906: lmodern warnings with bullets and cdots
On Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 15:02 +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> Elrond <elrond+bugs.debian.org@samba-tng.org> wrote:
>
> > So my suggestion would be to append something like the
> > following to the "How to use the Latin Modern fonts with
> > LaTeX-based engines?" section in README.Debian:
>
> No, for sure not. This problem is in no way related to Debian - it's
> either a general LaTeX problem (if Ralf is right with "(almost) always")
> or an lmodern problem, and should be documented at the right places. I
> won't clutter README.Debian with lots of things that don't belong
> there.
>
> > A \usepackage{textcomp} also solves a bunch of font
> > related issues that tend to come up with lmodern.
>
> And wherever you document it, please us a specific wording. "a bunch of
> font related issues" means approximately nothing, please say whether
> there are errors, or warnings, or wrongly displayed characters, and in
> what cases this occurs.
I would say it is a general LaTeX problem, and an awfully complicated
one to explain. Roughly speaking, there are several symbols (\textbullet
being one of them) which are either taken from the OMS/OT1 encoding or
from the TS1 encoding. The latter happens, when textcomp.sty is used.
Problems arise when you have a font (like LM) that does not support OMS
and OT1 encoding. In that case LaTeX substitutes the symbols from CM.
This is ok in this case, since the symbols from CM fit LM just fine.
With other fonts, they might look quite out of place.
That is the reason why Walter Schmidt (from whom I learned this) writes
for example:
,----[ Documentation for URW Garamond No.8 package ]
| Notice that ugm is supported with T1 (european) and TS1
| (textcompanion) encoding only, so you should issue the
| commands
|
| \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
| \usepackage{textcomp}
|
| in the document preamble. The obsolete OT1 encoding,
| which is still the default with LaTeX, is _not_ supported.
`----
Something like the documentation that accompany Walter's font packages
is missing for the LM fonts. And yes, this is an upstream issue. Current
lmodern package tries to get around this insufficient documentation with
this text, where especially the last paragraph is a bit diffcult to
understand:
,----[ /usr/share/doc/lmodern/README.Debian.gz ]
| How to use the Latin Modern fonts with LaTeX-based engines?
| -----------------------------------------------------------
|
| By LaTeX-based engine, I mean a program such as latex or pdflatex. This
| is very simple: just type \usepackage{lmodern} in the preamble of your
| documents. This will redefine \rmdefault, \sfdefault and \ttdefault so
| that the default Roman, Sans Serif and TeleType fonts are taken from the
| Latin Modern family.
|
| Don't forget to also use the fontenc and inputenc packages, unless you
| *know* you don't need them; otherwise you could still have font-related
| problems (however, these would not be directly related to Latin Modern).
`----
One could replace this with
,----
| How to use the Latin Modern fonts with LaTeX-based engines [1]?
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
|
| By adding
|
| \usepackage{lmodern}
|
| to the preamble of your document, the default Roman, Sans Serif and
| TeleType fonts will taken from the Latin Modern family.
|
| Please don't forget to select a suitable fontencoding. For example, for
| most texts using the latin script you should include
|
| \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
| \usepackage{textcomp}
|
| in the preamble.
|
| [1] By LaTeX-based engine, I mean a program such as latex or pdflatex.
`----
This text assumes that people who need other encodings than T1 (current
lmodern package supports also QX, current upstream supports at least
also T5) know what to change.
Of course, it would be better if upstream would provide better
documentation, so that one could refer users to 'texdoc lmodern'.
cheerio
ralf
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