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When I compile the code below with and without the \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, I get quite different results. The normalfonts are the same, but with T1 the characters in the section heading seem way too wide (a smaller font is scaled up?) while those in the LARGE line are actually a bit narrower. Why is this happening, and how do I get T1 to behave? Presumably the default OT1 fonts are the "correct" CMSS fonts?

\documentclass[12pt,flegn,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\sfdefault}
%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
\section{This is a long section title}
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
\par
{\LARGE Some very LARGE text Blah Blah}
\par
\lipsum[1]
\end{document}
Gonzalo Medina
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user27080
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1 Answers1

7

A comment to the question suggests using the lmodern fonts instead, which is the right choice nowadays. Back when I started using LaTeX, it was only just becoming standard practice for T1 to load vector PostScript fonts at all!

(If you open up an old PDF produced by LaTeX and the fonts look rubbish, it was before this time. Admittedly, it's nowhere near as bad these days since most PDF renderers now don't do such a bad job with bitmap fonts. Pre-Acrobat v6, I think, bitmap fonts were nigh unreadable in PDF documents.)

But for historical interest, this behaviour you discuss can be fixed by loading the fix-cm package; I can't put it better than its documentation:

In a nutshell, if one adds

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

to a document that uses the Computer Modern typefaces, then not only the T1 encoding is used but the fonts used in the document look noticeably different. This is due to the fact that the EC fonts have more font series designs, e.g. a 14.4 pt bold etc and those get used in the standard .fd files, while with Computer Modern (in OT1 encoding) such sizes were scaled versions of smaller sizes—with a noticeable different look and feel.

Will Robertson
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