gavin> Is it the same story with lmodern which is another frequently recommended font package?
I don't know. Norbert, is lm a recommends in Debian? That might be enough reason to \usepackage{lmodern} by default. If not, for the sake of minimalism, I would suggest just sticking with the default fonts, meaning [T1] and EC/cm-super. cm-super contains cyrillic and lm doesn't. OTOH, there's a claim that lm has more accented and other assorted glyphs. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1390/ I don't imagine either of these are critical factors for Texinfo. Best, Karl