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

[There are what amount to Type 1 versions of the EC fonts these days,
although the Latin Modern font collection is more recent.  See
http://tug.org/fonts. ---karl, 2006.]

=========
EC fonts:
=========

If you decide to run LaTeX 2e on ltxcheck.tex after installing a new version
of LaTeX 2e, you may get some political propaganda from the LaTeX team that
looks something like this:

	Checking T1 encoded Computer Modern (ec) fonts... 

	!Font \test=ecrm1000 not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found.
	<to be read again>
		\relax
	l.581 \checkfont{ecrm1000}

and so on.  Ignore this.  You don't have - and don't need - the EC fonts.

The EC fonts were derived from the CM fonts by extending the character set
from 128 to 256.  The main purpose of this was to include accented characters
for Eastern Europe and Western Europe (Latin 2 and Latin 1).  This makes it
possible to have proper hyphenation in languages that use accented
characters.  There have been other minor improvements such as better kerning
pairs in some cases.  The set of available faces has been vastly increased,
in part by adding obscure combinations of italic / bold / slanted / smallcaps
/ extended styles.  Note that you *still* need the CM fonts for math.  The EC
fonts are an *addition*, not a replacement, for CM.

The EC fonts are not available in scalable form.  They probably
never will be, because there are 565 fonts with about 113,000 glyphs
(323 EC fonts with 256 each, plus 237 TC fonts with 128 each)
compared to 75 fonts with about 9,600 glyphs for CM!

By the way, just to store the TFM files for EC can be a big burden.  
There are 565 of them and on a large disk with a FAT cluster size 
of 32k these metric files alone eat up 18.5 megabytes!

====================================================
An alternative: the EM fonts in Adobe Type 1 format:
====================================================

The EM font set is based on the CM font set, but adds about 100 ready-made
accented characters and other `missing' glyphs to the text fonts thus making
them suitable for TeX work in languages that use accented characters. 

The EM text fonts are set up as ordinary text fonts, unlike the CM text
fonts which have to be treated as pi/math/decorative non-text fonts.
This means that the EM fonts can also be used easily with applications
other than TeX such as Microsoft Word (R).

The EM font set consists of 57 EM text fonts and 13 EM math fonts.  Also
included in the EM font set are 16 CM math fonts.  No CM fonts beyond these
are needed.  Support for the EM font set is available under plain TeX, 
LaTeX 2.09, as well as LaTeX 2e.

With the EM font set you maintain the `CM look', yet can hyphenate text
properly in languages that use accented characters - all this with 
fonts in commercial grade Adobe Type 1 format.