Below are answers to some frequently asked questions about the
CM-Super fonts.

Q.1. Are the CM-Super fonts stable (version number 0.x)?

A.1. I just prefer to number versions from 0, not from 1. And I
consider the fonts quite stable. This does not mean that the fonts
will not be developped and improved.

General areas for future development:

* Increase the number of glyphs in each super-font (e.g. cover Greek,
  Vietnamese, ...)

* Improve the quality of the fonts.

There are some known problems which occur when using the fonts with
old versions of dvips. They were already fixed and will propagate in
the future versions of TeX distributions like teTeX, TeX Live, MikTeX.

Meanwhile, if your dvips gives an error related to using the CM-Super
fonts, you can use the option "-j0" as a workaround, to suppress
partial font downloading. The problem in dvips which occurs when the
same Type 1 font is re-encoded several times in one document (which
could occur if you are using the CM-Super fonts) has also been solved,
and the fixed version will appear in the future versions of TeX
distributions.

Note that VTeX/Free versions older than 7.6 had some bugs due to which
there were problems with using CM-Super fonts. Please upgrade to VTeX/Free
version 7.6 or higher.

Q.2. Are the CM-Super fonts complete?

A.2. Yes, they are rather complete even now: they cover the whole
EC/TC, EC Concrete, EC Bright and LH font set. The number of CM-Super
Type 1 fonts is 434, and they are a drop-in replacement for 2536 TeX
fonts! Each CM-Super Type 1 font supports 6 LaTeX font encodings: T1,
TS1, T2A, T2B, T2C, X2.

[the following excerpt is from README]
Note that a small number of (fortunately, rarely used) fonts are not
included yet because of the bugs in EC font drivers which prevented
their generation. We plan to provide these missing fonts soon.

Each Type 1 super-font currently contains 585 glyphs per non-SC font
and 468 glyphs per SC font.

Q.3. Are the CM-Super fonts supported?

A.3. Yes, as far as any free of charge product could be supported.
The fonts are also free (in the sense of freedom to distribute and/or
modify the fonts) and are licensed under the GNU General Public License.

It appears that in practice, the support for free products may be even
better than the support for commercial products.

I make no official promises for supporting the fonts, but I will try
to fix any reported bugs and will (if time permits) work on improving
the fonts in the future.

Q.4. Are the CM-Super fonts legal?

A.4. Yes, the fonts are totally legal. Licenses of EC/TC, EC Concrete,
EC Bright and LH fonts allow production and distribution of Type 1
fonts.

Q.5. What are the drawbacks? Size? Is it true that the converted fonts
are more than 3 times larger than commercial fonts (statement on the
TeXtrace site)?

A.5. No, this is not applicable to CM-Super fonts. Their size is
comparable to the size of commercial fonts. That is because the fonts
were optimized (and hinted) using FontLab 3 which significantly
reduced the number of control points used to encode the outlines.

The size of Type 1 outline files (*.pfb) is big because each such font
contains big number of glyphs (see A.2.). If a commercial-quality font
would include the same set of glyphs, it's size would be about the
same.

Q.6. What's the quality? Do the CM-Super fonts display nicely on
screen? When printed? Would you spot a difference to commercial
versions?

A.6. Printing quality is definitely very good. On-screen quality is at
least satisfactory (I let you judge on this topic :-). In my
experience, the PDF files produced using the CM-Super fonts look
better in Acrobat Reader than DVI files with bitmap fonts (both
previewers use anti-aliasing mechanisms).

Q.7. What "super" means in the name of the CM-Super font package?

A.7. The CM-Super package contains a collection of multilingual fonts
covering big number of glyphs (super-fonts) originating from Computer
Modern font families. It is NOT supposed to be a super-collection of
Computer Modern fonts: it contains only multilingual Computer Modern
fonts (super-fonts), but not all fonts related to Computer Modern.

We may, however, add some related fonts (e.g. Concrete math fonts)
which are not yet freely available in Type 1 format.

Q.8. How do I use the CM-Super fonts? I couldn't find any *.sty file
included with the CM-Super package.

A.8. Just use the fonts with any encoding(s) supported by the CM-Super
font package: T1, TS1, T2A, T2B, T2C, X2, with the default (Computer
Modern) or Computer Modern Concrete font families
(e.g. \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}). Once you have installed the CM-Super
fonts properly, your pdflatex, dvips or whatever driver will use
outline Type 1 fonts from the CM-Super bundle instead of the
corresponding bitmap fonts (in PK format).

Q.9. I would like to download the CM-Super package as one big file
instead of downloading a lot of small files.

A.9. All main CTAN nodes support archivation of files and directories
on the fly. So you can point your browser e.g. to
ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-super.tar.gz
and you will get a single tarball with the CM-Super package.
Note that restarting of incomplete downloads will not work in this case,
so you need a reasonably fast connection.

Q.10. What needs to be done to make PDF files produced by pdflatex
"searchable" in Acrobat Reader (and also make "cut-n-paste" work from
Acrobat Reader to other applications)?

A.10. You need to preload the CMap objects into the PDF file and
associate them with the fonts depending on font encodings. This can be
done by using the "cmap" package - see
CTAN:macros/latex/contrib/cmap
