Wishlist: Default to fonts with wide glyph support

[era]

I am trying to write Markdown with Russian, German etc examples. I would like for this to work out of the box.

What I am using now, which works nicely, is this:

    pandoc --latex-engine=xelatex -V mainfont:"Linux Libertine O" -V monofont="Ubuntu" ...

It requires texlive-xetex and ttf-linux-libertine; the choice of Ubuntu as the "monofont" is clearly suboptimal, as it isn't actually a properly monospaced font, and the metrics make it look rather bleak when it's mixed with Libertine, but it's a starting point.

Without these, the Russian text would render as blanks in the generated PDF file, with no warnings at any point. At the very least, it would be useful if there was a warning either from the PDF renderer or from the PDF generator when there is a problem with the glyphs. But I digress.

In order to support Pandoc out of the box, could these choices be made defaults on Ubuntu?

$ apt-cache policy pandoc
pandoc:
  Installed: 1.12.2.1-1build2
  Candidate: 1.12.2.1-1build2
  Version table:
 *** 1.12.2.1-1build2 0
        500 http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
Release: 14.04

[era (era)]

For what it's worth, I changed my own Makefile to use "Liberation Mono" for the monospace font. This is typographically somewhat more pleasing in many respects.