Latin Modern: Enhancing Computer Modern with accents, accents, accents

The number of (free) fonts prepared with METAFONT is surprisingly small compared, e.g., to what is available in the commercial market in other formats. Well, perhaps not so surprisingly: METAFONT generates TEX-oriented bitmap fonts which have not become popular outside the TEX world. Accepting this irksome situation as a challenge, we have prepared METAType1, a package for generating fonts in the PostScript Type 1 format accepted world-wide. The package makes use of METAFONT’s “sister”, namely METAPOST, and a few other utilities, such as awk and t1utils. Recently, an opportunity arose to embark METAType1 upon enhancing the Computer Modern family of fonts with diacritical characters, thus following in Lars Engebretsen’s footsteps, who also recognized the importance of the problem and created the AE (Almost EC) collection of virtual fonts. The task turned out to be fairly complex but well-suited for a fully programmable engine like METAType1. We here report on the outcome of the project, i.e., the Latin Modern family of fonts in the Type 1 format, and share the experiences gathered while accomplishing the task.