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For xelatex and lualatex the default font family is Latin Modern. The font does not cover a wide range of Unicode. Why not extend the font characters to cover other languages' script? or define a default font family with a greater coverage of Unicode like DejaVu font family? Thus one can add some non-Latin characters directly. 

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\textheight=2cm

\begin{document}

\makeatletter
\edef\textFontName{\fontname\csname
  \f@encoding/\f@family/\f@series/\f@shape/\f@size\endcsname}
\makeatother

See\footnote{Text Font: \texttt{\textFontName}}
μ % <- lmodern font do not contain this 

\end{document}

enter image description here

Martin Schröder
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Salim Bou
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1 Answers1

31

Latin Modern is closely related to Computer Modern (the other main contender being Computer Modern Unicode) This family of fonts is strongly tied to TeX's history.

Until very recently (2016 release) xelatex and lualatex defaulted, like pdflatex, to 7-bit cmr10.tfm so using the OpenType Latin Modern is already a big increase in coverage from that.

When people are experimenting with switching from classic TeX to luatex or xetex it is helpful to have a default setup that produces a broadly similar document, and that means that Latin Modern or Computer Modern Unicode are the only really viable defaults.

The default also needs to be a font distributed in major TeX distributions so that it can be reliably expected to be available on all the platforms where TeX is used.

David Carlisle
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    So why not extending Latin Modern font for more unicode coverage as xetex and luatex are developed for multilingual documents? – Salim Bou Oct 24 '19 at 19:38
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    @SalimBou we don't make the fonts. If someone offered some financial support to the TeX Gyre group to work on font design, maybe they would be interested, but most large multi-script fonts are either commercial or backed by major corporations like google, making a large unicode font to give away free is asking someone for a major undertaking. The latex maintainers can only make the default xelatex and lualatex font be a font that exists. – David Carlisle Oct 24 '19 at 19:41
  • Thank you so much @DavidCarlisle for clarifications. – Salim Bou Oct 24 '19 at 19:44
  • I would vote for cm-unicode. It has Cyrillic script and also based on cm. – Igor Kotelnikov Nov 03 '19 at 12:25
  • @IgorKotelnikov I'm not sure cm-unicode is in all tex distributions (especially minimalist ones) although probably if latex changed the default that would change. It would not be an unreasonable choice but it might be a change too far now, fontspec has default to lm since the start so that's many years of existing documents and even if fontspec default stayed as lm and just no-fontspec default changed then there would be potential changes to existing documents. In practice the "similar default to pdftex" argument only applies to English as pdflatex defaults to 7bit OTA cmr10 – David Carlisle Nov 03 '19 at 12:33
  • @DavidCarlisle: I guess that latin letters in Latin Modern and Computer Modern Unicode are identical so most existing text will not change if fontspec will change its default. At least if would be interesting to test such change on existing documents. – Igor Kotelnikov Nov 05 '19 at 11:08
  • @IgorKotelnikov some of the metrics differ as the latin modern fonts re-assesed the kern pairs etc, so linebreaking between computer modern and latin modern is different – David Carlisle Nov 05 '19 at 11:28