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A few years ago, the lmodern package was a good way to have high quality fonts by simply adding :

\usepackage{lmodern}

Nowadays, lmodern seems less popular. I'm wondering if it is because LaTeX default fonts received some improvements which make lmodern useless? Or because the package is abandoned? It hard to see if the package is still developed (a search on CTAN about lmodern does not return anything) and texdoc lmodern is not helpful...

So :

  1. Is it still useful to load the lmodern package?
  2. What are the effects/advantages of this package compared to normal (default) CM fonts?
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    I use it because \textasciitilde produces a high tilde in the default computer modern, but centred in lmodern. – Chris H Nov 27 '13 at 12:01
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    Related: Latin Modern vs cm-super?. My point about the German sharp s ⟨ß⟩ and accents still holds, which would be a reason to use lmodern for me. – doncherry Oct 3 '14 at 9:23
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    Yes! One more obvious enhancement of lmodern I noticed on the default computer modern is its sans serif font type. You can obvious see the difference of large bold sans serif texts, e.g. chapter titles. – oracleyue Oct 11 '17 at 19:03
  • However, lmodern does not have bold small caps, right? It is the only thing making me not want to use it :( – João Bravo Jan 21 '20 at 3:14
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There are so many fonts similar to Computer Modern (CM) now, a FAQ like the TeX FAQ might be valuable. Pending that, the answers to your two questions might be

  1. yes,
  2. Type 1 (T1) or OpenType (OTF) access to a moderate set of CM-like glyphs, without going into the extremely large cm-super set.

For what it's worth, I use the lmodern package for most of my documents. One day I'll graduate to something more exotic...

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    You can access slightly more exotic features of Latin Modern using cfr-lm. lmodern is better for some uses, though, notably if preparing documents for conversion with tex4ht. (I am not sure why but cfr-lm causes the conversion not to work properly, possibly due to use of virtual fonts - not sure.) Disclaimer: I wrote cfr-lm. (I primarily wanted access to the different styles of figures, variant styles etc. which are in the fonts but not supported by lmodern.) – cfr Nov 28 '13 at 4:17
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Well, none of the two most common LaTeX distributions use Latin Modern by default, they still keep Computer Modern (as of November 2013). So yes, calling \usepackage{lmodern} is still advised, unless you find cm-super (which is another fork of Computer Modern fonts) more convenient.

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  • In what sense is it still "advised"? What makes the Latin Modern font preferable to Computer Modern? – jvriesem Feb 7 '19 at 18:50
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    @jvriesem I know it's a while since you asked this question, but here's one reason: If you use \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} with Computer Modern, it uses bitmap fonts which end up pixelated. Latin Modern doesn't suffer from this problem. – bradrn Feb 21 '19 at 10:57

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