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

[Rasmus]

Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> 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

-- 
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