European Modern^TM

Do you like Computer Modern fonts, yet

• need "ready made" accented characters for proper hyphenation in TeX?
• need fonts in scalable Adobe Type 1 format (a.k.a. "PostScript" or "ATM" fonts)?
• or need to use fonts with non-TeX applications?

Then the EM font set is for you. The EM fonts are "commercial grade" hand-hinted ATM-compatible fonts in Adobe Type 1 format. The set consists of 57 EM text fonts, 13 EM math fonts, and 16 CM math fonts. It is self-contained and does not depend on additional fonts from the CM family.

There is nothing else like it.

European Modern sample (Acrobat PDF format; File size: 45K)

European Modern (EM) - the details:

The EM font set is based on the CM font set, but has many more glyphs. The fonts have been augmented with additional characters to cover the "standard" set of 228 glyphs in Type 1 text fonts, as well as Windows ANSI, and Macintosh standard roman. Each EM text font has over 90 ready-made accented and composite characters covering most of the Latin characters used in European countries. In fact, each EM text font has over 300 glyphs.

All of the standard CM text fonts have EM equivalents with related names, (e.g. EMBX12 corresponds to CMBX12) making it easy to switch from CM to EM. In addition, EM supports the "optical scaling" of CM (where different design sizes are treated as separate fonts -- yet each is scalable).

The EM font set also appeals to non-TeX users who like the Computer Modern look, since the text fonts are set up as normal text fonts (including a "space" character!), hence have a familiar layout -- unlike the CM text fonts with their own unusual layout (which does not even match ASCII!).

The EM text fonts do not suffer from the sparse glyph coverage of the CM text fonts. They are reencoded to platform-specific text font encoding for the platform on which they are installed, and are also subject to "on the fly" reencoding in the Y&Y TeX System -- unlike the CM fonts, which, because of their fixed hard-wired encoding, cannot be treated as normal "text" fonts. The EM fonts can, of course, also be used with printer drivers like DVIPS by setting up the appropriate remapping in "psfonts.map" (yet without need to resort to "virtual fonts").

European Modern fonts have other advantages over Computer Modern, such as support for "hanging hyphens," and proper subscript positioning with respect to upright upper case Greek letters (not possible in CM because CM draws these character from a text font, not a math font).

European Modern uses kerning with respect to "boundary characters" (i.e. "space") in order to get proper spacing to the left of opening quotes and to the right of closing quotes, independent of national conventions.

Accented characters in European Modern are "ready made" -- not constructed by over printing -- hence work correctly when copied to the clipboard or when searching in Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

Support for the EM fonts is available for plain TeX (and its derivatives), LaTeX 2.09, and LaTeX 2e. In LaTeX 2e (the current LaTeX), all you need to do is add

• \usepackage[LY1]{em} or
• \usepackage[LM1]{em} or
• \usepackage[T1]{em}

referring to em.sty, in the latest LaTeX PSNFSS support for the EM font set.

The EM text fonts have all the glyphs needed for T1 (Cork) encoding, as well as LY1 (TeX 'n ANSI) encoding, and LM1 (Textures) encoding. It is easy to use them with any of these (or some other encoding).

Discussion of Font Choices for TeX