Elsewhere, these FAQs recommend that you use an '8-bit' font to permit accentuation of inflected languages , and also recommend the use of Type 1 fonts to ensure that you get good quality PDF. Unfortuately, the combination proves not to be entirely straightforward: it's not always easy to find a satisfactory set of Type 1 fonts.
The recommendations prove to be contradictory: there are obstacles in the way of achieving both at the same time. You can use one of the myriad text fonts available in Type 1 format (with appropriate PSNFSS metrics for T1 encoding, or metrics for some other 8-bit encoding such as LY1); you can use a commercial or shareware CM-like Type 1 fonts; or you can use virtual font manipulations - but all these options have their drawbacks.
If you use someone else's text font (even something as simple as Adobe's Times family) you have to find a matching family of mathematical fonts, which is a non-trivial undertaking - see "choice of scalable fonts".
Commercial CM-like fonts cost money: remarkably little money for commercial products with such a large intellectual property input, but more than this author could ordinarily expend... Y&Y offer their "European Modern" set: an extension of the CM fonts that may used either with T1 or LY1 encoding; these are fonts from the same stable that gave us the free AMS/Blue Sky Research/Y&Y fonts, sensitively extended (though they don't cover the more eccentric areas of the T1 encoding, and don't come in the same welter of design sizes that the EC fonts offer). Micropress offer the complete EC set in Type 1 format, as part of their range of outline versions of fonts that were originally distributed in Metafont format. See "commercial distributions".
The shareware BaKoMa TeX distribution offers a set of Type 1 EC fonts, as an extra shareware option. (As far as the present author can tell, these fonts are only available to users of BaKoMa TeX: they are stored in an archive format that seems not to be publicly available.)
Virtual fonts
help us deal with the problem, since they allow us to map
"bits of DVI file" to single characters in the virtual font;
so we can create an "é" character by recreating the DVI
commands that would result from the code "\'e". However, since
this involves two characters being selected from a font, the
arrangement is sufficient to fool Acrobat
Reader: you can't use the program's facilities for
searching for text that contains inflected characters, and if you
cut text from a window that contains such a character,
you'll find something unexpected (typically the accent and the 'base'
characters separated by a space) when you paste the result.
However, if you can live with this difficulty, virtual fonts are a
useful, straightforward, and cheap solution to the problem.
There are two virtual-font offerings of CM-based 8-bit fonts - the ae ("almost EC") and zefonts sets; the zefonts set has wider coverage (though the ae set may be extended to offer guillemets by use of the aeguill package).