Font setup

[josephwright]

The beamer font setup is a bit ... odd. I know why Till set things up sanserif, but I wonder if we should perhaps start with a 'no font change' position (so CM/LM as for article) and

1. Provide some xbeamer-font package that sets the fonts as-for beamer (or perhaps a load-time opt-in option?)
2. Document that the preferred approach is to use fontspec/unicode-math methods (eventually to be integrated into the kernel?) to set fonts
3. Show some examples, e.g. Noto Sans

[samcarter]

4. Switch to sans serif by default and load https://ctan.org/pkg/sansmathfonts with an option to opt-out? This would avoid all the beamer hacks and still allow sans serif output (I don't think serif fonts with their usually thinner stems are very readable in a potentially blurry projection, so I would prefer sans serif as default. I'd hate to see more serif presentations just because users use the defaults).

   From the examples I've seen on Q&A sites, sansmathfonts seems to be rather robust and gives nice results.

[cfr42]

does this change dependency handling for distributions? (not a reason against.)

[josephwright]

@cfr42 Nowadays there's really no need to worry too much: whilst I realise that Linux users might have a split-up TL, on Windows, macOS or Overleaf the likelihood is either a full TL or on-the-fly MiKTeX set, so everything is 'just there'. In terms of listing requirements, we are not looking at a lot of packages here

• unicode-math, which will over time I think be rolled into the kernel and which I'd say is required for a working Unicode LaTeX install
• newcomputermodern
• sansmathfonts

That's a pretty short list :) (We will have other requirements, most obviously geometry at the moment - all of the l3 stuff will end up rolled into l3kernel over time, and that's required for LaTeX anyway.)

[Skillmon]

@josephwright how are we going to handle lists? Are we aiming to be enumitem compatible?

[josephwright]

@cfr42 In terms of dependencies, once I have something vaguely working for my own use cases plus key aspects we definitely need for others, I will start to get this down in docs - probably like siunitx in the manual and I guess a DEPENDS file for TL - I know Karl doesn't want 'conditional' dependencies, but I think we can find a way.

[josephwright]

@Skillmon As you'll see, the plan is to require the new (LaTeX) template code, where enumitem-like functionality is something we are aiming for anyway.