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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label ECfonts</title>
</head><body>
<h3>What are the EC fonts?</h3>
<p/>A font consists of a number of <em>glyphs</em>.  In order that the
glyphs may be printed, they are <a href="FAQ-whatenc.html"><em>encoded</em></a>, and
the encoding is used as an index into tables within the font.  For
various reasons, Knuth chose deeply eccentric encodings for his
Computer Modern family of fonts; in particular, he chose different
encodings for different fonts, so that the application using the fonts
has to remember which font of the family it&rsquo;s using before selecting a
particular glyph.
<p/>When TeX version 3 arrived, most of the excuses for the
eccentricity of Knuth&rsquo;s encodings went away, and at TUG&rsquo;s Cork
meeting, an encoding for a set of 256 glyphs, for use in TeX text,
was defined.  The intention was that these glyphs should cover &lsquo;most&rsquo;
European languages that use Latin alphabets, in the sense of including
all accented letters needed.  (Knuth&rsquo;s CMR fonts missed things
necessary for Icelandic and Polish, for example, but the Cork
fonts have them.  Even Cork&rsquo;s coverage isn&rsquo;t complete: it misses
letters from Romanian, Eastern and Northern Sami, and Welsh, at
least.  The Cork encoding does contain &ldquo;NG&rdquo; glyphs that
allows it to support Southern Sami.)  LaTeX refers to the
Cork encoding as T1, and
provides the means to use fonts thus encoded to avoid problems with
the interaction of accents and hyphenation 
(see <a href="FAQ-hyphenaccents.html">hyphenation of accented words</a>).
<p/>The only Metafont-fonts that conform to the Cork encoding are the
EC fonts.  They look CM-like, though their metrics
differ from CM-font metrics in several areas.  The fonts are
now regarded as &lsquo;stable&rsquo; (in the same sense that the CM fonts
are stable: their metrics are unlikely ever to change).  Their serious
disadvantages for the casual user are their size (each EC font
is roughly twice the size of the corresponding CM font), and
there are far more of them than there are CM fonts.  The simple
number of fonts has acted as a disincentive to the production of Adobe
Type 1 versions of the fonts, but several commercial suppliers offer
EC or
EC-equivalent fonts in type 1 or TrueType form &mdash; see

<a href="FAQ-commercial.html">commercial suppliers</a>.  Free 
<a href="FAQ-textrace.html">auto-traced versions</a> (the CM-super
and the LGC fonts), and the Latin Modern series (rather
directly generated from Metafont sources), are available.
<p/>


Note that the Cork encoding doesn&rsquo;t cover mathematics (and neither do
&ldquo;T1-encoded&rdquo; font families, of course).  If you&rsquo;re using
Computer-Modern-alike fonts, this doesn&rsquo;t actually matter: your system
will have the original Computer Modern fonts, which cover &lsquo;basic&rsquo;
TeX mathematics; more advanced mathematics are likely to need
separate fonts anyway.  Suitable mathematics fonts for use with other
font families are discussed in 
&ldquo;<a href="FAQ-psfchoice.html">choice of scalable fonts</a>&rdquo;.
<p/>The EC fonts are distributed with a
set of &lsquo;Text Companion&rsquo; (TC) fonts that provide glyphs for
symbols commonly used in text.  The TC fonts are encoded
according to the LaTeX TS1 encoding, and are not viewed as
&lsquo;stable&rsquo; in the same way as are the EC fonts are.
<p/>The Cork encoding is also implemented by virtual fonts provided in the
<a href="FAQ-usepsfont.html">PSNFSS system</a>,
for Adobe Type 1 fonts, and also by the <i>txfonts</i> and
<i>pxfonts</i> font packages

(see <a href="FAQ-psfchoice.html">&ldquo;choice of scalable fonts&rdquo;</a>).
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>CM-super fonts</i></tt><dd><a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-super.zip">fonts/ps-type1/cm-super</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-super.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-super/">browse</a>)
<dt><tt><i>CM-LGC fonts</i></tt><dd><a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-lgc.zip">fonts/ps-type1/cm-lgc</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-lgc.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-lgc/">browse</a>)
<dt><tt><i>EC and TC fonts</i></tt><dd><a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ec.zip">fonts/ec</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ec.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/ec/">browse</a>)
<dt><tt><i>Latin Modern fonts</i></tt><dd><a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/lm.zip">fonts/lm</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/lm.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/lm/">browse</a>)
</dl>
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=ECfonts">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=ECfonts</a>
</body>