Copyright 2007 TeX Users Group.
You may freely use, modify and/or distribute this file.

[DC has long since been replaced by EC and Latin Modern, see
http://tug.org/fonts.  --karl, 2006]

===========
`DC' fonts:
===========

What are DC fonts?
------------------

DC fonts are based on the character shapes in the CM fonts, but cover the
full `Cork' or `T1' character set (256 glyphs), instead of the `TeX text' or
`OT1' (128 glyphs) character set.  T1 is an 8-bit encoding, while OT1 is
7-bit.  The DC fonts are said to be in their final form as of this writing
(February 1997).  The LaTeX development team is promoting the use of DC.

The motivation for development of the DC fonts was to provide readymade
accented / composite characters for Western Europe and Eastern Europe.  While
accented characters can be constructed by overprinting in CM fonts, that
mechanism prevents TeX from being able to properly hyphenate words containing
accented characters.  Consequently, the DC fonts provide advantages only if
you use languages that use accented / composite characters.

In order to make space for the added accented characters, DC text fonts do
not contain some of the characters found in CM fonts, such as the upper case
upright Greek characters buried in the code range 0 - 31 in CM text fonts.
This means that the basic DC font set must be augmented with additional fonts
called `text companion' fonts.

DC fonts are invoked in LaTeX 2e when using the default CM fonts and
switching encoding to T1 using

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

DC fonts only exist in METAFONT / PK bitmapped form.  There appear to be
no plans to provide DC fonts in scalable outline (Type 1 or TrueType) form.

How to deal with this:
----------------------

(0) If you work mostly in English, there is no advantage to using DC fonts.
Only disadvantages, since they do not exist in scalable outline form.

(1) If you do not have DC fonts and have a LaTeX 2e job calling for them, you
can comment out the \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}.  This means the job will run
instead with CM fonts.  Accented characters will appear correctly, but words
containing accented characters will not be hyphenated.

(2) Use fonts other than CM.  Real text fonts in Type 1 format (of which
there are over 30,000 now) contain 228 `standard' glyphs, including 58
accented / composite characters covering Western Europe.  You can reencode
them to T1 layout (Cork), or better yet to LY1 (TeX 'n ANSI).  The latter has
the advantage that you do not loose access to 38 graphical symbols found in
most text fonts.

(3) Reencode the CM text fonts from Y&Y to T1 (or whatever) encoding.  These
have additional accented / composite character not found in the BSR CM fonts.
The reencoded fonts do not completely cover the T1 character set, but
typically everything you may actually care about. These reencoded fonts must
be given new font names and new file names of course to avoid confusion with
the original CM fonts.  Note that since you will lose the upper case upright
Greek characters from the text fonts when reencoding, you will need to still
use some of the original CM fonts to provide for these characters in
mathematics.