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It seems something strange is going on with the glyph Å in EB Garamond. Consider this example:

\documentclass{memoir}
\usepackage{ebgaramond}

\begin{document}
Test Å Ä Ö 
\end{document}

enter image description here

I compiled this as:

% latexmk -pdf test.tex

on my Mac. The ring is supposed to be centered above the A but it is not. Can this be fixed somehow?

If I instead do:

% latexmk -lualatex test.tex

or:

% latexmk -xelatex test.tex

it looks much better.

If I try on https://googlefonts.github.io/ebgaramond-specimen/ I get this effect: enter image description here

Which also makes me somewhat hopeful. Why will not LaTeX produce the same output and what can be done about it?

jonalv
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    Under pdflatex you should use \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} (under xelatex or lualatex you should not). – daleif Dec 08 '23 at 14:44
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    The life should be much more simple if we leave old pdftex from TeX distributions and use only modern Unicode TeX engines. I don't understand why people keep using pdftex and, moreover, it is default engine in most TeX distributions. Unfortunately. – wipet Dec 08 '23 at 16:46
  • @wipet was ahead of me, but I must endorse that comment. If at all possible, use utf-8 encoding, and compile with lualatex (Or possibly xelatex) using OpenType fonts, loaded by fontspec package. There are some old fonts that are not designed for this, but there are many new fonts that are better, and you can also use commercial fonts if you have the license. Some fonts (including EBGaramond) have the new OpenType. If you have the package, it is already in your system. – rallg Dec 08 '23 at 19:57
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    @wipet one problem is that it's impossible to upload a preprint to arXiv unless it uses pdftex. On arXiv you have to upload the source and then it compiles it for you, but they only support pdftex. You can try to do things like compile the pdf in lualatex and then upload a .tex file that just includes the pdf, but for some reason they go out of their way to detect that kind of thing and prevent it. So for academics the use of other tex engines is de facto forbidden. – N. Virgo Dec 09 '23 at 06:15
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    But it has simple solution. If we (TeX community) do stop supporting the pdftex software then arxiv must do change too. They will not be able to request pdftex because they will unable to install it on their servers (if pdftex will be unsupported in TeXlive and other common TeX distributions). This is typical question: which came first, the chicken or the egg. – wipet Dec 09 '23 at 06:27
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    @wipet as long as the alternatives are so slow and pdftex is good enough for most people I don't see it going away. – daleif Dec 09 '23 at 06:34
  • pdftex brings more disadvantages than advantages. There are endless encoding worries, obscure and very complicated installation of only old fonts, modern fonts are not supported at all, users are often confused about what engine was used, etc. And potentially new users look at us as weirdos, they play with 30 year old software not supporting Unicode (in 2023). This hinders the development of TeX. – wipet Dec 09 '23 at 06:47

1 Answers1

9

Add this and it works fine under pdflatex

\usepackage{iftex}
\iftutex\else
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\fi

If T1 is not specifified then Å is a combination of A and a TeX placed accent. And that might go wrong. Under T1 we tell pdflatex to actually go and grap the char from the font.

Under xelatex and lualatex they grap the char from the font by default.

Relevant url https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/677/ from @marquinho in a comment.

daleif
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    @jonalv For some more context about the T1 encoding, see Why should I use \usepackage T1 fontenc? – marquinho Dec 08 '23 at 14:53
  • Hm, I should know this. I guess I got fooled by the fact that it worked so well for Ä and Ö. I guess they must be different somehow.... – jonalv Dec 08 '23 at 15:27
  • Is there any drawback of using \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} with miktex? Should it be used also for English language documents that use special diacritics only rarely? – Pygmalion Feb 20 '24 at 11:52
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    @Pygmalion for pdflatex is should basically always be used. It tells the compiler that the letter or combination (letter with accent) is in the font at a specific location (the t1 encoding). Without latex will try to create the accent plus letter, something that might not suit this particular font. Just remember that it should not be used with xelatex or lualatex – daleif Feb 20 '24 at 13:23