Re: \texteuro does not work

["Thomas A. Schmitz" <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

On Feb 12, 2007, at 6:50 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

> A question to Hans: I do not know much about fonts, but from what I
> understand ec is ugly and one should use texnansi. So why does ConTeXt
> default to ec. I am sure that for most users like, fonts in TeX is a
> mystry, and they do not really care which font encoding is used, as
> long as it works. So, can we move to texnansi as the default? Or is
> there something at which ec is really better?
>
> Aditya

Well, it pretty much depends what you want. EC has lots of accented  
letters for many languages, and since it is much more popular in the  
LaTeX world than texnansi, you'll find many more tfm files in your  
TeX installation with ec encoding than with texnansi. In fact, having  
texnansi as default was one of the headaches in my early ConTeXt days  
because ConTeXt would ask for texnansi-lm... files which simply  
weren't there. Many convenient things (like Euro, a couple of  
fractions, degree etc.) are not in ec, but in the LaTeX world, most  
ec-fonts are accompanied by a ts1-encoded counterpart, and switching  
to this for these symbols is automatic; we don't have this in  
ConTeXt, AFAICS. But now, Latin Modern is pretty complete, as are the  
tex gyre fonts, so yes, IMHO, switching to texnansi as default could  
make sense.

\startmode[hansmode]
Ah, wait for luatex where fonts can use the afm and create encodings  
on the fly, so we don't need to worry about this anymore!
\stopmode

;-)

Thomas