On Feb 12, 2007, at 6:50 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
A question to Hans: I do not know much about fonts, but from what I understand ec is ugly and one should use texnansi. So why does ConTeXt default to ec. I am sure that for most users like, fonts in TeX is a mystry, and they do not really care which font encoding is used, as long as it works. So, can we move to texnansi as the default? Or is there something at which ec is really better?
Aditya
Well, it pretty much depends what you want. EC has lots of accented letters for many languages, and since it is much more popular in the LaTeX world than texnansi, you'll find many more tfm files in your TeX installation with ec encoding than with texnansi. In fact, having texnansi as default was one of the headaches in my early ConTeXt days because ConTeXt would ask for texnansi-lm... files which simply weren't there. Many convenient things (like Euro, a couple of fractions, degree etc.) are not in ec, but in the LaTeX world, most ec-fonts are accompanied by a ts1-encoded counterpart, and switching to this for these symbols is automatic; we don't have this in ConTeXt, AFAICS. But now, Latin Modern is pretty complete, as are the tex gyre fonts, so yes, IMHO, switching to texnansi as default could make sense. \startmode[hansmode] Ah, wait for luatex where fonts can use the afm and create encodings on the fly, so we don't need to worry about this anymore! \stopmode ;-) Thomas