truetype fonts in tetex, pdftex, pdflatex

[Ian Malone]

Paul Johnson wrote:
>>> Oops, sorry, F8 works okay.  I've been messing about with
>>> TeX so much this weekend that I forgot what I'd tried on which
>>> machine.
>>>
>>> Thanks again to you both for your advice.
>>>
>> It seems I wasn't entirely wrong; this happens when you use LyX,
>> as it includes a \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} which messes up font
>> expansion.  The work-around appears to be avoiding cm (using
>> super-cm, cm-lgc or another font such as lmodern).
>>
> 
> I had installed the TexLive testing version and it processed many
> documents correctly, but I uninstalled it after several LyX documents
> failed.
> 
> Can you tell me what you mean about avoiding "cm"?  How?  What do you
> mean?  What is super-cm?  I've sometimes inserted this in the preamble
> because it is supposed to avoid the "bad fonts in pdf output"
> 
> \usepackage{lmodern}
> 
> But this did not change the weird output I was getting from TexLive.
> 

cm-super:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-super/

(Similarly cm-lgc, which is available as a Fedora RPM, but
is scaled to different weights.)

I'm not very familiar with what's going on here, but it
seems the TeX fonts (basically CM) internally use an odd
encoding scheme (i.e. not ASCII or similar).  This means
there is potential for confusion when packages work with
glyphs, especially when two or more are trying to do so.
Mappings are meant to address this but, for example, the
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} above instructs it to use a
different encoding (to get easier support for accented
characters I think).  One of the things cm-super is meant
to do is fix this by using a more standard encoding, as
fonts like lmodern do.

For LyX you could try exporting plain LaTeX to find out
what it's doing that's upsetting TeXLive.  The LyX
mailing lists are usually quite active too.

-- 
imalone