Re: microtype for texinfo

[Karl Berry]

    There is a new converter in texi2any of Texinfo to LaTeX, 

I didn't know. Cool! People have long wanted this. Mainly so they can
change fonts. So I hope you will support that -- which I think amounts
to allowing the user to add stuff to the preamble after your builtings.

    On my debian

Ultimately, whether outline fonts are used or not depends on the
contents of pdftex.map (for pdftex) or psfonts.map (for dvips), which
list .tfm filenames and corresponding outline fonts. The behavior you're
seeing sounds normal/expected to me, as far as I understand it.

    So, my question is how does Texinfo TeX select scalable fonts for the
    letters that exists in cm fonts, while LaTeX does not?  Is there a way
    to have LaTeX select the same scalable fonts as TeX (even when cm-super
    is not installed)?

It is the [T1] option you are giving to {fontenc} which ends up using
the ec fonts, which require cm-super for outline. Without the [T1],
LaTeX uses the original cm* fonts (as texinfo.tex does), which does not
depend on cm-super (but also results in many characters being
unavailable, hyphenation of words with accented characters not working
right, and so on).

At any rate, I don't think it's necessary for us to worry about
this. Any practical usage wants outline fonts, and thus cm-super is
required (short of entirely changing the fonts being used). If someone
goes to the trouble of removing cm-super, well, they're asking for
bitmaps, so they're getting what they ask for.

I would not advise removing the [T1]. That will cause more trouble than
it solves. Along the lines of what Gavin said, I think it's more
useful/important for the LaTeX output from Texinfo to be "normal" LaTeX
than to try to perfectly replicate texinfo.tex. That won't be doing
users any favors.

By the way, a separate issue: as soon as the LaTeX backend is availabl,
people will surely want to run xelatex or lualatex and use ttf/otf
fonts, which means getting rid of the {fontenc} call entirely. (And
using \usepackage{fontspec}\usepackage{unicode-math} instead.) So
whether {fontenc} is included should be configurable. Maybe each one of
those default \usepackage's should be configurable, for that matter. I
can imagine people wanting different euro symbols, for example.

Best,
Karl