Re: microtype for texinfo

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 04:22:44PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
>     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.

That is already possible, simply use a @latex block in the Texinfo
preamble, it will be after the builtin preamble and before
\begin{document}.  But this does not allow to substitute \usepackage
in the builtin preamble.

> 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).

Ok.

> 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.

At least on debian, cm-super is not much installed automatically as a
dependency.  It is a Suggest of texlive-fonts-extra and a dependency of
texlive-full.  So I do not expect casual users to have it installed
unless it is documented in the Texinfo manual (which is already the
case, it is documented in the Texinfo manual).  cm-super-minimal isn't
much more installed (I think I got it as a python3-matplotlib Suggest)
and does not allow to have scalable fonts used in Texinfo TeX for the
ec glyphs, not in LaTeX output from Texinfo code with [T1] {fontenc}.

> 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.

Ok.

> 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.

I will add to the LaTeX.pm specific TODO.  It is up to Gavin, but
usepackage configuration for LaTeX output will probably not be for the
next release.

-- 
Pat