Marcin Borkowski <mb...@mbork.pl> writes: >> I would also suggest removing inputenc. At the moment, it is loaded >> with the AUTO option. AFAIK, this is redundant since most recent >> (meaning for quite a few years) TeX engines already use the encoding of >> the file if nothing is specified. > > Can you elaborate on that? AFAIK, XeTeX and LuaTeX use UTF-8 by > default, but pdfetex (which is the default LaTeX engine) does not. And > quite a lot of people ose pdfetex (me included;-)). I haven't heard > about any heuristic determination of encoding by TeX (and I hope nothing > like that happens, since it could be disastrous).
At least on Windows/Miktex this isn't working. And while I don't like miktex enough people do. >> The next one would be fontenc, now it is loaded with T1. I'm not sure >> if this is needed. Maybe LaTeX experts like Marcin or Fabrice could >> comment. > > Thanks for calling me an expert, though I'm not one regarding fonts and > their encodings;-). > > With fontenc, the thing is tricky. I do not know much about other > languages, but you actually can't use LaTeX to typeset texts in Polish > without changing the default LaTeX's font encoding (which is OT1, and it > doesn't support some Polish letters). (Usually, I do not use fontenc > for that, since there is a specialized package for Polish typesetting.) > > I guess that removing fontenc for non-English texts might lead to > erroneous results – at least in case of presence of certain Polish words > (e.g., some names in bibliographies). I guess we don’t want that. > > OTOH, one thing we /might/ want to add is \usepackage{lmodern}. The > Latin Modern family of fonts is a drop-in replacement for the default > Computer Modern, but with all sorts of accented characters. Using this > font family has the advantage that accented characters are not build > from letters and accents, but are single glyphs in the font. AFAIR, > this makes words containing accented letters hyphenatable. Not a huge > gain, but sometimes may be important (especially in some languages, and > with narrow columns). If people have the need for additional fonts they can add it. In a patch further down the thread I add support to set backends for packages (so fontenc is only loaded if using pdflatex). If you'd replaced lmodern with libertine I would have been more inclined to agree (though it might not have as wide support as LM). BTW: I guess any of the GUST fonts would have pretty great glyph support. An easy mechanism for changing font package is nice. E.g. I use libertine by default, but in some cases I'd might want to use another package in which case I'd want to have libertine replaced. >> We could also take this opportunity to provide users an easy way to >> switch between TeX engines. > > I second that! Feel free to test the patch in another post. If's difficult because: (i) we want to be able to change engines with some liberty, but not to much (e.g. you can run xelatex but you can't run myrandomscript.sh); (ii) the info plist is not available at compile time so we have to write the info to file, in the patch I use the AUCTeX latex-command var; (iii) it would be nice to support flags (-shell-escape), but see (i). Rasmus -- I hear there's rumors on the, uh, Internets. . .