Hello,

Since there are serious problems with XeTeX on non-TeXLive
distributions anyway: why not mess it up properly this time?


The attached file seems to work OK, although kpathsea complains a bit
(but these are only warnings - no serious problems; perhaps other
macros could or should be adapted - I didn't dig too much into the
internals):

kpathsea: Illegal fontname `[lmsans12-regular]': contains '['
kpathsea: Illegal fontname `[lmsans10-bold]': contains '['
kpathsea: Illegal fontname `[lmsans12-oblique]': contains '['
kpathsea: Illegal fontname `[lmtypewriter12-regular]': contains '['
kpathsea: Illegal fontname `[lmtypewriter10-oblique]': contains '['

Can someone please take a look? I don't know how well this integrates
with luaTeX. Perhaps the name can be changed from
\definexetexfontsynonym to \defineotffontsynonym or something similar,
so that the underlying code can then differ depending on whether it's
luatex or XeTeX the one which has to access the otf fonts.

If this or a modified version of it makes it into the core, I would
suggest another (slightly radical) change - to redefine default
encoding to "uc" instead of "ec" for XeTeX (and luatex) before loading
the formats. It would be really great if the default XeTeX settings
would simply work out-of-the-box, contrary to now, when the default
ec-lmr is nearly useless.

Mojca