\’e”. However, since this involves two characters being
selected from a font, the arrangement is sufficient to fool
Acrobat Reader: you can’t use the program’s
facilities for searching for text that contains inflected characters,
and if you cut text from a window that contains such a
character, you’ll find something unexpected (typically the accent and
the ‘base’ characters separated by a space) when you paste
the result. However, if you can live with this difficulty, virtual
fonts are a useful and straightforward solution to the problem.
There are two virtual-font offerings of CM-based 8-bit
fonts — the ae (“almost EC”) and
zefonts sets; the zefonts set has wider coverage
(though the ae set may be extended to offer guillemets by
use of the aeguill package). Neither offers characters such
as eth and thorn (used in, for example, in
Icelandic), but the aecompl package works with the
ae fonts to provide the missing characters from the
EC fonts (i.e., as bitmaps).
The sole remaining commercial CM-like 8-bit font comes from
Micropress, who offer the complete EC set
in Type 1 format, as part of their range of outline versions of fonts
that were originally distributed in Metafont format. See
“commercial distributions”.
The shareware
BaKoMa TeX distribution offers a
set of Type 1 EC fonts, as an extra shareware option. (As far
as the present author can tell, these fonts are only available
to users of BaKoMa TeX: they are stored in an archive format that
seems not to be publicly available.)
Finally, you can use one of the myriad text fonts available in Type 1
format (with appropriate PSNFSS metrics for T1 encoding,
or metrics for some other 8-bit encoding such as LY1). However,
if you use someone else’s text font (even something as simple as
Adobe’s Times family) you have to find a matching family of
mathematical fonts, which is a non-trivial undertaking —
see “choice of scalable fonts”.
Comments, suggestions, or error reports? - see “how to improve the FAQ”.
This is FAQ version 3.19c, last modified on 2010-01-08.