Bug#459539: texlive-lang-cyrillic: Really large cyrillic fonts unavailable

[Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@web.de>]

Hi Andrey,

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 11:02 +0300, Andrey wrote:
> Package: texlive-lang-cyrillic
> Version: 2007.dfsg.3-1
> Severity: normal
> 
> To reproduce:
> 
> 1) Download and unzip the file
> 
>    http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~dreuw/download/beamerposter-example.zip
> 
> 2) Run latex/pdftex on file example.tex -- you will get a sample
>    poster with really large glyphs in it (you will need package beamer
>    installed).
> 
> 3) Change
> 
>    \usepackage[english]{babel}
>    \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
> 
>    to
> 
>    \usepackage[russian]{babel}
>    \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
> 
>    in preamble and run latex/pdftex again. It will report problem:
> 
>    ERROR: Enormous number has been reduced.
> 
>    Although poster will be created, there will be no large glyphs.
> 
> Looks like needed cyrillic fonts are lacking or misconfigured. Regular
> LaTeX documents with cyrillics are produced just finely, the problem
> exists only for really large fonts.

This is a complicated topic. First of all, the fonts provided together
with texlive-lang-cyrillic use Metafont, hence in the final result
bitmap fonts are used. For such bitmap fonts it is customary to
provide them only at predefined font sizes so that it is indeed
difficult to get huge fonts. However, the cm-super package provides
these fonts as scalable vector fonts. And together with type1ec.sty it
is possible to produce cyrillic fonts at arbitrary sizes:

\documentclass{article}
% type1ec should be the first package to be loaded
\usepackage[10pt]{type1ec} 
% I have only cm-super-minimal installed, 
% hence the 10pt option is required 
\usepackage[T1,T2A]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\begin{document}
\fontsize{100pt}{150pt}\selectfont яверты
\end{document}


I have tried to do something similar in the beamerposter example, but
did not succeed. It looks as if beamerposter does something unusual
with the font setup. Maybe it would help to install
scalable-cyrfonts-tex, since the example tries to use Helvetica for
which I have no cyrillic fonts installed. I have not tried that,
though.

Overall I cannot see what's wrong in the setup of cyrillic fonts in
general. 

cheerio
ralf