I recently became aware of the existence of the fix-cm
package. I've looked at the documentation in fixltx2e.pdf, but it's not clear to me exactly what the problem is that it fixes. Should I worry that I have been getting suboptimal glyphs all this time? Or should I only worry if the log contains something like:
LaTeX Font Warning: Size substitutions with differences
(Font) up to 13.12pt have occurred.
or
LaTeX Font Warning: Font shape `OT1/cmr/m/n' in size <X> not available
?
Should I just always use it? Are there any downsides?
Concern stems from this part of the documentation:
The appearance of the T1 and TS1 encoded CM fonts (aka ‘EC’) is made as similar as possible to the traditional (OT1 encoded) ones. Particularly, a number of broken or ugly design sizes are no longer used, the look of the bold sans serif typeface at large sizes is considerably improved, and mismatches between the text fonts and the corresponding math fonts are avoided.
Does this apply to the default situation with pdflatex
, with Postscript Type 1 CM fonts embedded in the PDF? Can anyone provide an example of output with different appearance when using fix-cm
?
While searching for information, I discovered the package anyfontsize
, which apparently allows arbitrary scaling for any font, not just Computer Modern. Does this accomplish the same thing as fix-cm
, but more generally?
The fixltx2e documentation is adamant that one must load fix-cm
before \documentclass
and use the command \RequirePackage
, like so:
\RequirePackage{fix-cm}
\documentclass ...
and says not to do this for any other package. Meanwhile, anyfontsize
is just loaded normally with \usepackage{anyfontsize}
. If anyfontsize
accomplishes the same thing, how come it doesn't need to be loaded first with \RequirePackage
? Conversely, if the fix can be done in a normal package, why is fix-cm
so stringent?
Thanks for the suggestions for alternate font packages. Let's assume that I want to use Computer Modern, and I want to stick with the default version in TeX Live 2012 (which I believe is the Bluesky conversion of CM to Postscript Type 1), because I've heard that this is the highest-quality vectorization (at least if you don't need the new symbols in lmodern
.) Discussion about this properly belongs to another question, like Why does Latin Modern make strange-appearing output? or Latin Modern vs cm-super?.
\usepackage{lmodern}
.