[Tex/LaTex] fontenc changes sans serif bold font in KOMA-script

font-encodingskoma-script

Consider the following MWE:

\documentclass{article}
%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document}

\textbf{\textsf{Some text}}

\end{document}

The output of the above code is

enter image description here

and doesn't change if I uncomment the line

%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

Consider now the following MWE with scrartcl class instead of article:

\documentclass{scrartcl}
%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document}

\section{A section}
\textsf{Some text}
\end{document}

enter image description here

Uncommenting the line

%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

you get

enter image description here

As you can see, the sans serif font of the title is less bold than without fontenc, while the normal text is not changed.

Does fontenc, combined with a KOMA-script class, load a different sans serif font, but only for bold face?

Best Answer

The source of the difference is not the different design but the the available font sizes:

Without fontenc, in OT1 encoding, for the section title a 10pt font (cmssbx10.pfb) is used which is scaled to 14.4pt. This gives a rather bold looking font. With T1-encoding a font designed for 14.4pt is used (sfsx1440.pfb).

If you like the bolder look then you can either load the fix-cm package which will suppress the use of the larger optical sizes. The document will then use sfsx1000.pfb scaled up, or as already suggested use the lmodern package which doesn't have the larger optical sizes.

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