Re: ox-latex: default packages cleaning

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2015-07-07, at 21:35, Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com> wrote:

> I would like to second microtype.  In fact as far as I know, now a days
> it is recommended to load that for almost all documents with significant
> text on TeX.SX.

As I wrote a minute ago, I would rather not add microtype, though it's
a minor thing, really.

> I would also suggest removing inputenc.  At the moment, it is loaded
> with the AUTO option.  AFAIK, this is redundant since most recent
> (meaning for quite a few years) TeX engines already use the encoding of
> the file if nothing is specified.

Can you elaborate on that?  AFAIK, XeTeX and LuaTeX use UTF-8 by
default, but pdfetex (which is the default LaTeX engine) does not.  And
quite a lot of people ose pdfetex (me included;-)).  I haven't heard
about any heuristic determination of encoding by TeX (and I hope nothing
like that happens, since it could be disastrous).

> The next one would be fontenc, now it is loaded with T1.  I'm not sure
> if this is needed.  Maybe LaTeX experts like Marcin or Fabrice could
> comment.

Thanks for calling me an expert, though I'm not one regarding fonts and
their encodings;-).

With fontenc, the thing is tricky.  I do not know much about other
languages, but you actually can't use LaTeX to typeset texts in Polish
without changing the default LaTeX's font encoding (which is OT1, and it
doesn't support some Polish letters).  (Usually, I do not use fontenc
for that, since there is a specialized package for Polish typesetting.)

I guess that removing fontenc for non-English texts might lead to
erroneous results – at least in case of presence of certain Polish words
(e.g., some names in bibliographies).  I guess we don’t want that.

OTOH, one thing we /might/ want to add is \usepackage{lmodern}.  The
Latin Modern family of fonts is a drop-in replacement for the default
Computer Modern, but with all sorts of accented characters.  Using this
font family has the advantage that accented characters are not build
from letters and accents, but are single glyphs in the font.  AFAIR,
this makes words containing accented letters hyphenatable.  Not a huge
gain, but sometimes may be important (especially in some languages, and
with narrow columns).

> We could also take this opportunity to provide users an easy way to
> switch between TeX engines.

I second that!

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University