The "Latin Modern" (lmodern) fonts are the result of an effort by several TeX User Groups in Europe to provide a consistent set of LaTeX fonts. The Computer Modern fonts were designed with the somewhat limited capabilities of older hardware in mind. A set of PostScript fonts has been available for a while, but these fonts (apparently) are not complete enough to set all languages based on the latin alphabets (Polish, Lithuanian, Vietnamese etc - languages with special characters and a lot of accents).
Thus the so-called TeX-Gyre fonts, of which Latin Modern is one, provides a systematic re-implementation of the most popular latex-fonts. The fontspec package, unless instructed otherwise, will default to latin modern, so yes, lmodern is probably required to use xelatex + fontspec. Package maintainers are free to include the TeX-Gyre fonts or not. By the way, in my opinion LaTeX + related is one of the packages for which it is generally better to not rely on the package maintainers of a linux distribution. Latex is a very complex set of interrelated softwares, packages, etc, and TeXLive is an excellent, and easily installed and maintained, package which is best installed by hand. Cheerio, Wilfred --- On Fri, 16/4/10, Raphael Frey <freyraph...@lavabit.com> wrote: > From: Raphael Frey <freyraph...@lavabit.com> > Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Xetex won't compile without Lmodern fonts > To: xetex@tug.org > Date: Friday, 16 April, 2010, 5:56 PM > On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:22:31 -0500 > Herbert Schulz <he...@wideopenwest.com> > wrote: > > > Try the [cm-default] option for fontspec. Also, I'd > put the fontspec > > line before the xunicode line but I'm not sure it > makes a difference. > > Thank you and Peter Dyballa for your help and informaitons. > The problem > was (and still is) that the ‘texlive-xetex’ package in > Debian (stable > and unstable) has no dependency to the ‘lmodern’ > package – ‘lmodern’ is > not even a recommendation of the ‘texlive-xetex’ > package. But it seems > that this problem now gets fixed soon. I supposed that the > Latin Modern > fonts are as important to Xetex documents as the Computer > Modern fonts > to Tex/Latex documents but I was not 100 % sure – > therefore I asked > here. (And I neglected to consult the documentation of the > ‘fontspec’ > package.) > > Best regards > > Raphael > > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
