Re: [O] ox-latex: default packages cleaning

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi Rasmus,

On Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 04:53:35PM +0200, Rasmus wrote:
> 
> If it's a means to archive "high-quality" paragraphs, maybe microtype is
> probably the 'proper' fix...

I would like to second microtype.  In fact as far as I know, now a days
it is recommended to load that for almost all documents with significant
text on TeX.SX.

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.

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.

> * Fixltx2e
> 
> This packages is depreciated with TL2015 cf. LaTeX News 22.  We can use
> \RequirePackage[current]{latexrelease} but there's no point in that....
> AFAIK latexrelease only useful for backwards compatibility.

Didn't know about this.  Thank you.  I would vote for dropping it.

> * marvosym¹ 
> * Wasysym² 

Agreed.  On top of this, wasysym also interferes with integral symbols
from amsmath[1].

We could also take this opportunity to provide users an easy way to
switch between TeX engines.  I have been using XeLaTeX with Org and
outside for quite a few years now.  Originally what used to be very
hacky, is now simply replacing a couple of packages in the header and
calling xelatex instead of pdflatex.  And the list of packages is pretty
much identical for LuaLaTeX.  This is what I would use:

  \usepackage{fontspec}
  \usepackage{microtype}
  \usepackage{polyglossia}  % instead of babel
  % of course this should be something appropriate for the buffer
  \setdefaultlanguage[variant=british]{english}

So an option like tex-engine:xelatex or tex-engine:lualatex adds the
above to the default packages and the right binaries.  Just an idea.

Cheers,


Footnotes:

[1] At least that's what comments in my setup tell me :-p:
    https://github.com/suvayu/.emacs.d/blob/master/org-mode-config.el#L136


-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.