Fonts – Why Latin Modern is the Default Font with XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX

defaultfontslatin-modernluatexxetex

For xelatex and lualatex the default font family is Latin Modern. The font does not cover a wide range of Unicode. Why not extend the font characters to cover other languages' script? or define a default font family with a greater coverage of Unicode like DejaVu font family? Thus one can add some non-Latin characters directly. 

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\textheight=2cm

\begin{document}

\makeatletter
\edef\textFontName{\fontname\csname
  \f@encoding/\f@family/\f@series/\f@shape/\f@size\endcsname}
\makeatother

See\footnote{Text Font: \texttt{\textFontName}}
μ % <- lmodern font do not contain this 

\end{document}

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Best Answer

Latin Modern is closely related to Computer Modern (the other main contender being Computer Modern Unicode) This family of fonts is strongly tied to TeX's history.

Until very recently (2016 release) xelatex and lualatex defaulted, like pdflatex, to 7-bit cmr10.tfm so using the OpenType Latin Modern is already a big increase in coverage from that.

When people are experimenting with switching from classic TeX to luatex or xetex it is helpful to have a default setup that produces a broadly similar document, and that means that Latin Modern or Computer Modern Unicode are the only really viable defaults.

The default also needs to be a font distributed in major TeX distributions so that it can be reliably expected to be available on all the platforms where TeX is used.

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