Maxim Nikulin <maniku...@gmail.com> writes: > There are cm-super fonts for at least of 15 years.
There are many tradeoffs in many aspects. No single font pleases everyone. So you want to say: Your requirements are more important/common/stylish/whatever that the requirements of other people? I do need only latin characters and math (so Latin Modern would suffice), but still I use different fonts from time to time (like Libertine, Palatino and others) - and I also mix different fonts (not all font families provide serif and sans serif and monospace glyphs). And due to the history of TeX and the structure of font files, there is no single command to set up all required information to switch all font families with one command. Usually up to 3-4 command are required (sometimes more for more advanced requirements) are needed to change most relevant font information. Frankly, I'm completely clueless why this should be a problem. Yes, it may be unfortunate that not all fonts available support all Unicode glyphs ever invented. But on the other hand: Most of the free fonts are created by people in their free time and it takes VAST amounts of time and talent to create nice looking fonts. I appreciate the many fonts that creative people created to be used for free. So if all I have to do to use this massive gift is drop a couple of commands in some or all my documents, I do not complain - I'm grateful. I understand that it sometimes sucks to be forced to use tools that are created with a massive US centric world view, that not only focuses on latin characters, but even only respcect ASCII (e.g. even today quite some systems have problems with german umlauts). But try to get over it: At least in the case of Emacs, Org, and LaTeX it is possible and in most cases quite easy to overcome the restrictions that the default settings may impose. [unicode-math] > Thank you for the hint. Do you think Org should use it by default? > Are there any caveats? Yes, unicode-math should be seen as must have for lualatex and xelatex (if math is used). As far as I know there are no downsides and it should be part of the default packages (but only for lualatex and xelatex, not for pdflatex). > If LuaTeX and XeLaTeX handles Unicode better, is it possible to make > any of them the default option and to leave pdflatex as a fallback? That is possible today and you can easily change the LaTeX engine via global options in your Emacs init.el or via local settings inside Org documents. > Is it possible to detect lualatex and xelatex in runtime? At runtime of the LaTeX engine, so execute LaTeX commands depending on the engine that processes the document containing these commands? Yes, that is possible. The LaTeX package iftex provides macros to execute commands based on the running engine (see https://www.ctan.org/pkg/iftex?lang=en). > Should some packages for lualatex and xelatex be added to default > list to minimize user problems and at the same time keeping > configuration safe? (unicode-math, etc.) Maybe. I'm currently myself struggling a little bit with a flexible configuration, that can be used with many different kind of documents (short notes, larger reports, beamer presentations) and provides all the extras I like to use. There is no clear best package list for every use case (in some cases unnecessary loaded packages only waste time, in other cases, especially with some individual set of package options, there might be errors in some scenario or another). > Is it possible to provide reasonable defaults for fonts? I do not think so. You want Cyrillic. But what about Japanese, Chinese, Devanagari, Tamil, Arabic etc? I doubt that there exists a single font that supports all these scripts satisfactorily. Despite the existence of the Unicode encoding(s), the glyphs and font designs are still quite complex and demanding even for a single script. But maybe we could assemble a list of good (enough) fonts for different languages/scripts and provide a default setup in Org for LaTeX export, that sets a proper font for the chosen document language? -- Until the next mail..., Stefan.