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Date:         Fri, 6 Nov 2009 23:43:35 +0100
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From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Lars_Hellstr=F6m?= <Lars.Hellstrom@RESIDENSET.NET>
Subject: Please don't \RequirePackage{lmodern}
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
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Status: R

When development of xparse (and whatsnot) picked up speed earlier this 
year, one thing that bugged me was that I couldn't use my usual tools 
for viewing the typeset source anymore -- if I tried, there would be 
scores of "missing font" errors. It did work to pdflatex things and 
view the PDF, but for screen reading of things I've typeset myself I'm 
really more comfortable with DVI.

Yeah, I'm a dinosaur. But I think most people on this list are that in 
one way or another. ;-)

The catch, as it turned out, was that l3doc.cls says 
\RequirePackage{lmodern} (well, in recent revisions it's 
\RequirePackage{lmodern,textcomp}), and I can certainly understand why: 
bitmap fonts aren't nice in PDF. But PDF shouldn't be the only 
possibility. (Oh, I can probably teach my old DVI viewer about the 
Latin Modern fonts -- and if the font names have stabilized it might 
even be a one time effort -- but I'm not sure I care enough for them to 
bother doing that.)

 From a purist point of view, I suppose what bugs me is that the choice 
of lmodern is hardwired into l3doc.cls -- this kind of thing rather 
belongs in some l3doc.cfg, so that people with different preferences 
can do it differently; maybe even differently for latex and pdflatex. 
Moreover, there doesn't seem to have been a specific decision to use 
lmodern, as this isn't mentioned in the repository logs. (I've traced 
\RequirePackage{lmodern} back to the initial revision 850 of l3doc.dtx, 
so apparently it was put in while l3doc.cls was the source, but I 
haven't been able to narrow it down any further because SVN seems to 
have problems coping with files not being in the current working copy. 
Still, no log message for a revision touching l3doc.cls mentions 
lmodern.) Hence it has a distinct smell of someone's personal setting 
escaping onto the trunk.

I'd like to have it removed, or at least moved to a .cfg file.


Lars Hellström