Problematic font interactions

Question

In one of my (big) projects of a few years ago, I was using fourier as the main font and roboto condensed as default sans-serif font (mainly used in (sub)section titles). This worked fine.
I tried to recompile the project today and I discovered that, among others, the italic and slanted styles are ignored. This seems to be due to an interaction between roboto condensed and fourier.
Here is a minimal working example that shows my problem:
documentclass{memoir}

usepackage{fourier}
usepackage[condensed]{roboto}

begin{document}
    Test textit{Test} textsl{Test} textbf{Test} (Test) textsf{Test}
end{document}

Here is the output:

If I replace usepackage[condensed]{roboto} by usepackage{roboto}, then the output becomes:

As you can see, the latter work fine, but not the former. What am I doing wrong?

egreg · Accepted Answer

This is quite similar to Problems with italics in other font when using roboto condensed but requires a few more tricks in order to remove annoying spurious warnings. I added also a scaling for Roboto, which otherwise is taller than Fourier (actually Utopia).

documentclass{memoir}
usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % fourier does it, so it's best here

% avoid a spurious warning about cmr
DeclareFontShape{T1}{cmr}{c}{n}{<->ssub*cmr/m/n}{} % avoid a spurious warning

% load roboto (but scaled because fourier is less tall)
usepackage[scaled=0.9,condensed]{roboto}

% avoid a spurious warning about futs
input{t1futs.fd}
DeclareFontShape{T1}{futs}{c}{n}{<->ssub*futs/m/n}{} % avoid a spurious warning

% load fourier
usepackage{fourier}

% fix the wrong setting by roboto
renewcommand{seriesdefault}{m}

begin{document}

Test textit{Test} textsl{Test} textbf{Test} (Test) textsf{Test}

end{document}

Davislor · Answer

Although you mention in the comments that you’re using PDFTeX, another solution is to load OTF versions of the fonts in LuaLaTeX (or XeLaTeX).  You can load Erewhon Math as your Fourier replacement, through fourier-otf or unicode-math, and the OpenType version of Roboto with setsansfont.
I would recommend using the modern toolchain when you can, and legacy 8-bit fonts when you have to.  Upgrading will wipe out a lot of technical debt to old packages.

Problematic font interactions

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