[HN Gopher] Using Computer Modern on the web (2013)
___________________________________________________________________
Using Computer Modern on the web (2013)
Author : phab
Score : 87 points
Date : 2021-05-12 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.checkmyworking.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.checkmyworking.com)
| bitwize wrote:
| Oh, for the love of... Join the 21st century and write your
| papers in Word, with readable fonts, like everyone else.
| lou1306 wrote:
| 21st century Word could still learn some lessons from 20th-
| century TeX (and 19th-century typography, in general). Any Word
| document I ever tried to create is plagued with bad kerning and
| bad geometry, and the defaults are basically guaranteed to give
| you bad-looking results.
| pgtan wrote:
| Go, learn some (scientific) typography, then try Word, then
| come again.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Word is the wrong tool for the job unless you're looking to do
| something simple, like print out a shopping list. XeTeX FTW, or
| Pages, or pretty much anything else, even Excel, is a better
| choice.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Note that if you use Xe(La)TeX, for example, you get all the
| goodness and flexibility of LaTeX to structure and manage
| your document, along with the ability to seamlessly use all
| the same fonts you could use in Word etc.
| OJFord wrote:
| That is extremely field-dependent.
|
| I doubt many CS papers are written in Word, and I doubt many..
| I don't know, archeology reports are written _not_ in Word.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Word is not bad at fixing my grammar, but once you start to
| know things that look decent, you will see the way word fails.
|
| For one thing, it still can't make hyphenations correctly, it
| doesn't allow you to use small caps correctly, and I don't
| think it has support for lower case/old style letters.
|
| All in all no big issues unless you are happy with documents
| that just look of.
| dhosek wrote:
| Word's defaults are crappy and you need to go to the second
| tab on the font dialog to fix them, but it is capable of
| doing proper small caps and lower case/old style numerals.1
|
| I don't do hyphenation or full justification in Word so I
| can't speak to that, but despite being a long-time LaTeX
| user, for most of my writing, I prefer working in Word (not
| least of why is that it's the expected format for most non-
| technical writing which is the majority of my writing).
|
| 1 I assume that you meant numerals and not letters.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| Try TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org), which, despite the name would
| make one think that it descends from TeX and Emacs, is related
| to TeX only for the typographical quality and to Emacs for the
| extensibility. It has the ease of use of a word processor and
| it is controllable through an own native macro system and
| Scheme Lisp.
| jfk13 wrote:
| The paragraph supposedly in "Computer Modern Serif Upright
| Italic" is broken; it just uses the browser's default font
| (because the actual name used in the @font-face rule doesn't
| include "Serif").
| jfk13 wrote:
| And while I'm nit-picking, "Computer Modern Concrete" isn't a
| thing; the font (family) is called Concrete Roman.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Roman
|
| (Not, of course, to be confused with Roman Concrete:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete.)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Some of the faces I like but many of them are badly rasterized at
| some sizes if not all all sizes.
|
| Also the font metrics are off the "w" and "e" in "weird" are too
| close for comfort on the web. TeX has a complex algorithm to
| justify text for print and maybe it looks better in that context.
| 5tefan wrote:
| I read a lot. Novels, work related stuff. I also get old.
|
| As for now my fonts of choice are Bookerly and Atkinson
| Hyperledgible.
|
| Because from my experience they make it easier on my eyes.
| Noticably so.
|
| I would set them asap as global font in Win10 if this would be
| possible.
|
| Please note, that I haven't said anything about style or beauty
| or so. Ergonomics first. CM is not even close to what I want from
| a font.
| mminer237 wrote:
| If you actually want to, you can change the font in Windows by
| editing the registry to remove Segoe UI and set whatever you
| like as the alternative: https://www.howtogeek.com/716407/how-
| to-change-the-default-s...
|
| (I would strongly recommend making a backup of those keys
| first.)
| 5tefan wrote:
| Forgot to tell that it's a corporate setup. Not going to
| happen. But I'll shock the IT guys and put the request in.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| > Bookerly and Atkinson Hyperledgible
|
| Most people who use CM are interested in math fonts.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Is Bookerly even available for download, or is it exclusive of
| Kindle?
| cpp_frog wrote:
| I am actually thinking of starting a math blog where I have to
| use extensive use of mathematical symbols. Using computer modern
| would also be nice. My idea was to keep the blog as minimalistic
| as possible, but I have not figured out how to do it the way I
| like. Terry Tao's blog [0] uses images for math symbols, and
| other people use MathJax [1] (but macros, which are used for
| convenience take too long to load). Maybe I'll just have to keep
| linking to PDFs.
|
| [0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/
|
| [1] https://www.mathjax.org/
| mixedmath wrote:
| MathJax works well for me, but I also don't make extensive use
| of macros. It's also possible to demacro your tex.
|
| I'll also note that Terry started his site a long time ago,
| when mathjax either didn't exist or worked poorly. He's used
| the same latex2html compiler for a long time (as it isn't
| broken), but the images are pretty silly. Now it's pretty
| straightforward to make a simple math site [1] (in the style of
| the bettermotherfucking website [2]).
|
| [1]: https://davidlowryduda.com/static/simplemathpage.html [2]:
| http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
| occamrazor wrote:
| KaTeX is much faster, but has more limited support for macros.
| It is a good choice for little or moderate math content, but
| for some use cases Mathjax is (almost) the only practical
| choice.
| doerig wrote:
| If you want to go with a default LaTeX style, you could look
| into LaTeX.css [0] (disclaimer: I'm the author of the project).
|
| [0] https://latex.vercel.app/
| leephillips wrote:
| Math-heavy documents using MathJax seem to take longer to load
| than PDF versions of similar documents, and don't look quite as
| good. I would say, for highly mathematical content, you might
| as well just use LaTeX and link to PDFs. You can use hyperlinks
| to go back and forth between PDF and HTML documents, so the
| experience can be basically seamless for the reader. It helps
| to format the PDFs with web reading in mind, rather than using
| typical journal paper styles.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Computer Modern is one of the most butt-ugly fonts ever designed,
| and it would have already died a well-deserved death if it were
| not the default font of math and TeX. We can do much better, and
| we should.
| bcoates wrote:
| The hinting on Computer Modern Sans is broken to the point of
| unreadability at default font size on my system
|
| Windows + Chromium + ~200dpi display, default (1.5x) display
| scale
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| old url, old discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954882
| m000 wrote:
| Just no. CM font was made for printing. It was last updated in
| 1992, before PDF was even a thing. CM is not made for screens and
| it is a horrible idea to use it on the Web.
|
| > It's so good-looking that some scientists do research just so
| they can write it up in Computer Modern.
|
| It's more like "undergrad students use it in their papers because
| they don't know better". The only Computer Science publications
| I'm aware of that still use CM are the Springer LNCS/LNAI series.
| Which also happen to still use a template optimized for printing
| the proceedings as books. And AFAIK, these templates are
| universally hated and considered archaic and outdated: They look
| bad everywhere (screen, A4 printout, letter printout) except the
| Springer-printed paper volume.
| wiz21c wrote:
| I'm one of those undergrad students :-) What are the better,
| more current, ways of prepare, say, a thesis document with
| maths, pictures ?
| fuklief wrote:
| I'm using the following for fonts.
| \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
| \usepackage[largesc]{newpxtext} \usepackage{newpxmath}
| \usepackage[supsfam=newpx]{superiors}
| m000 wrote:
| TBF, I was one too :-)
|
| FWIW, for non-math, single column text, LuaLaTeX + plex-otf
| [1] is my current favourite combo. Reads well both on screen
| and on paper. But if you are heavy on math, you will need to
| setup a second font to replace CM in the math formulas. You
| can also scout the top conferences/journals in your niche
| (i.e. where your prof. publishes) and pick a template you
| like. The templates are typically linked with every CfP, and
| you can expect that they will have worked-out the common
| cases for their field.
|
| [1] https://ctan.org/pkg/plex-otf
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Springer's sample document for monographs^1 and books
| contains \usepackage{newtxtext}
| \usepackage{newtxmath}
|
| for font setup.
|
| 1. https://resource-cms.springernature.com/springer-
| cms/rest/v1...
| dheera wrote:
| CM isn't good for the web, but it _is_ pleasing in print IMO.
|
| I do agree though it has been abused a lot as a status symbol.
| Back at MIT, having a resume in CM spoke "I come from a
| science/engineering background" right off the bat, while having
| a resume in a Microsoft font spoke "I go to the business
| school".
|
| If you move away from CM, great, there are lots of better web-
| friendly fonts, but don't go to TNR for f*ck's sake. TNR is
| awful. Unfortunately some publications have gone down this
| hole.
|
| I like Crimson Pro of late. It looks VERY pleasing on mobile
| LCD/LED and e-Ink screens, has the effect of making your device
| feel like a quality printed book, and has a full selection of
| weights.
|
| https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Crimson+Pro
| augstein wrote:
| Always the same objections, from the same people, when it comes
| to CM.
|
| It's mostly just subjective nowadays, just like your whole
| 'argument'.
|
| I think it looks great on high res displays, which should cover
| a huge chunk of all consumer displays used today.
| justaj wrote:
| I can only offer my opinion and an image. I think CM looks
| terrible on dark backgrounds: https://0x0.st/-M8w.png
|
| (This is with the Dark Reader extension in Dynamic mode with
| these settings: https://0x0.st/-M8g.png)
| halikular wrote:
| World wide the most used screen resolution is 1920x1080 at
| ~9% all other top resolutions is somewhere around 720p [1].
| Even on desktop computers the top resolutions is 1920x1080 at
| ~21% followed by 1366x768 also at ~21% [2]. I still only use
| 1080p screens due to superior performance in games, refresh
| rate, battery life and that you don't have to deal with
| scaling issues. Things have changed since I bought them three
| years ago, but I don't need to upgrade.
|
| [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats
|
| [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-
| stats/desktop/w...
| Syzygies wrote:
| Computer Modern is the "plaid shorts" of TeX fonts. I
| profoundly admire all of Don Knuth's efforts, and I've had the
| pleasure of a number of conversations with him. He threw in the
| towel himself, recognizing that artists could design better
| fonts than computers.
|
| To excel at math requires focus. When I see Computer Modern I
| see an author who didn't get distracted choosing a better font.
| Not just undergraduates.
| sdgegdfg wrote:
| It's good that he threw in the towel. It takes a bit of a
| galaxy brain perspective to conclude that by being amateurish
| in his approach to font implementation with TeX/Metafont,
| Knuth was somehow being a more professional mathematician.
|
| We need to accept that Knuth was an amateur type designer who
| was genuinely preoccupied with fonts ( _"I can't go to a
| restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts
| on the menu." -- Donald Knuth_
| https://twitter.com/TeXtip/status/1389329788628783104). He
| could have delegated the design of the first font for his TeX
| system to a professional type designer. He didn't.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > He could have delegated the design of the first font for
| his TeX system to a professional type designer.
|
| Knuth started work on TeX's fonts about the same time that
| he began work on TeX and Metafont (1977-78). CM was largely
| completed by about 1984-86. He was a computer science
| professor. I'm not aware of any funding he procured to
| develop TeX. You're saying he had the financial resources
| to hire a professional type designer for _fonts_ for an
| academic publishing system of unknown future?
| sdfsefgsrgerg wrote:
| By 1980 Knuth was working with Hermann Zapf. So he was
| able to interest Zapf in his software essentially
| immediately. Knuth was a prestigious figure, so it's not
| a shock. Stanford students of typography and CS
| participated in the detailed production work on the font
| that was made with Zapf. It doesn't sound like funding
| was an issue.
|
| Sure, bootstrapping the TeX project would have been a bit
| more difficult if a font designer had been required from
| the start; on the other hand, maybe Metafont would have
| been a more successful font design system if type
| designers had been (more?) involved from the outset.
|
| "Zapf designed and drew the Euler alphabets in 1980-81
| and provided critique and advice of digital proofs in
| 1983 and later. The typeface family is copyright by
| American Mathematical Society, 1983. Euler Metafont
| development was done by Stanford computer science and/or
| digital typography students; first Scott Kim, then Carol
| Twombly and Daniel Mills, and finally David Siegel, all
| assisted by John Hobby. Siegel finished the Metafont
| Euler digitization project as his M.S. thesis in 1985."
|
| It's worth noting, more generally, that Knuth himself has
| described a realization that he gets better results from
| delegating tasks than from "going it alone":
|
| "Some of you may recall that I wrote the entire program
| for TEX78 and TEX82 all by myself, and you may be
| wondering whether I've done the same for iTeX. Don't
| worry: This time around I'm having the job done by people
| who know what they're doing. After many years I've
| finally come to realize that my main strength lies in an
| ability to delegate work and to lead large projects,
| rather than to go it alone. Programming has never really
| been my forte for example, I've had to remove 1289 bugs
| from TEX, and 571 from METAFONT."
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _Just no. CM font was made for printing. It was last updated
| in 1992, before PDF was even a thing. CM is not made for
| screens and it is a horrible idea to use it on the Web._
|
| The same can be said about _P.D.F._ files.
|
| I recently found out why so often when copying from them,
| spaces are either inserted doubly, or removed: the reason is
| that the format has no understanding of spaces, only of
| distance between characters and is completely about
| praesentation, lacking semantics in any way.
|
| When copying, the reader simply applies a heuristic of what
| distance between characters constitutes a space, and is often
| wrong.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| It is not the case that treatment of spaces is completely
| wild and ad hoc. PDF can, and frequently does, contain the
| text itself along with the display of said text. This is why
| applications like pdftotext can often give you correct
| plaintext output.
|
| OCR applications are able to make PDFs from scanned images
| accessible and searchable (and with the right spaces)
| precisely because they embed their output into that layer of
| the PDF meant for the text itself, not its presentation.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Actually what OCR programs do is a very clever hack. PDF is
| mostly just a way to describe how to render pages, and just
| like with any rendering frame work that can involve a
| bitmap, a set of stroke and fill commands, or some text
| rendering. A scanned document obviously is just a huge
| bitmap, but if you can identify the text, and can define a
| font that doesn't draw anything, then you can add
| instructions to the PDF to render that text in that font
| and as long as you can specify character positions
| everything will line up nicely.
|
| If you are generating a PDF with text you can render a
| string with spaces and let the glyph layout sort it out, or
| render individual characters, or draw those characters by
| hand and use the invisible font trick (because your font is
| not licensed for embedding). It's not that you're using
| different conceptual layers of the PDF, you're just
| choosing how to render your content.
| [deleted]
| klodolph wrote:
| The format understands spaces just fine. The problem is that
| programs that produce PDFs are often designed just to make
| the PDF look correct, without any care for semantics.
|
| I think there's just a bunch of history here--print is the
| use case that you really want PDF to get correct, and so you
| take existing print pipelines which discard semantics and add
| PDF as a new backend. This is the easy/lazy way to get PDF
| working, and there are also tons of PDF pipelines are just
| stapled onto the end of a print pipeline as if PDF were
| another type of printer.
|
| You'll see a night and day difference between one of those
| pipelines and something more suited to processing a document
| with semantics, like FrameMaker. FrameMaker seems to be a bit
| more niche now that print documentation is less mainstream.
|
| I can understand why the PDF ecosystem is a bit frustrating,
| but I still prefer it when I'm reading academic papers
| explaining some algorithm or mathematical concept.
| sneak wrote:
| My own blog, which has sometimes appeared here on HN, has
| paragraphs set in Computer Modern.
|
| It's a sort of cheeky stylistic hack, in my view, as CM adds a
| particular feeling to reading text set in it based on the
| contexts in which it otherwise appears. This is why I chose it,
| back in 2015 when I designed the current iteration of my website.
|
| I thought I was being super clever, and only learned in the last
| year or so that CM on the web is A Thing.
| ajarmst wrote:
| The link to the cm-unicode project cited in the article is
| broken. Interested browsers can find it at https://cm-
| unicode.sourceforge.io/
| mihaic wrote:
| While I always found Computer Modern to be a beautiful font,
| every paper I read that's typeset with it seems harder to
| understand. I find it hard to explain, but it somehow makes
| processing information and retention harder for me, and it took
| me a long while to be sure that it wasn't the novelty of the
| subject matter.
| Sunspark wrote:
| It's because it has the same feel as Bodoni. I hate Bodoni.
|
| Too much stretched vertical emphasis, feels unbalanced and
| depressing to me.
| m000 wrote:
| Let me guess: You're one of those hippies reading papers on
| your screen in order to save the trees.
| lmns wrote:
| Am I the only one who never liked Computern Modern? It works and
| the math symbols are very complete, but it just looks way too
| thin.
| teddyh wrote:
| The common look of CM which you probably have always seen _is_
| way too thin. Just look at some printed versions (as in printed
| on actual paper) of CM, like in Knuth's books for instance, to
| see how CM is _supposed_ to look.
| Tomte wrote:
| That's because the usual Computer Modern font files today are
| too thin.
|
| Knuth designed in a "blacken" factor and gave instructions how
| to tune it to your specific printer.
|
| Because the correct amount is dependent on your printer and its
| printing technology. Ink tends to blur a bit, for example.
|
| There are font files around that try to make CM a bit more
| correct on typical printers today, but most people don't know
| about it and are using some bad default CM.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is similar to how the "pixel art" versions of old
| console games _never existed_ because the TV CRTs didn't have
| definite hard lines between pixels. Computer Modern was
| designed to be bitmapped when printed and so took into
| account that it would all be dots not infinitely thin lines.
|
| Amusingly enough, this is basically "The Renaissance" done in
| a short time; just as they perceived the "Greek" style as
| bare marble statues and buildings which never actually
| existed.
| mrob wrote:
| LCD-based portable consoles existed. The Sega Nomad ran the
| same games as the Sega Genesis, which are often said to
| "require" CRT blur.
| moshmosh wrote:
| If the Nomad's display was anything like the SMS-based
| Sega Gamegear, then it may not have had CRT blur but it
| did put its own not-so-crisp spin on the picture:
|
| https://youtu.be/pU4jnSVfZsI?t=188
|
| (left side at the time marker is the original Gamegear
| screen, right is a mod with a modern screen)
|
| Oh, found one of a Nomad with the original screen:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j0mXNb6YPk
|
| Similar. A little less washed-out, but still not what we
| think of when we think of the precision of a modern LCD.
|
| As I recall, LCD PC monitors until some time into, I
| dunno, maybe '05 or so, were regarded as almost always
| worse than CRT monitors in practically every way[0],
| including picture quality. Better than a typical consumer
| tube TV, maybe, but even some of those produced a crisper
| picture than a lot of LCDs, especially tiny low-power
| ones like that (the Sony Wega comes to mind)
|
| [EDIT] [0] Practically every way except size & weight, I
| mean, obviously, and despite crushing CRTs on that front,
| were pretty unpopular due to being _so much_ worse
| otherwise.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I remember two recent uploads to CTAN:
| https://ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern and
| https://ctan.org/pkg/newcomputermodern. FYI. Never tried
| them, myself.
| playpause wrote:
| When I look at the individual glyphs, or even whole passages, I
| don't like it. It looks wispy and particular. But there's
| something really nice about the way it comes together on a
| printed page in a well set academic paper. It just looks right.
| Which could be a kind of Stockholm Syndrome I guess. I feel
| similarly about Courier and screenplays.
| tobr wrote:
| At least for screenplays there's Courier Prime [1]. Perhaps a
| Computer Modern Prime would be popular.
|
| 1: https://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/
| Sunspark wrote:
| Courier Prime is a good font, but one piece of advice.. if
| you use fonts aliased as I do, you need to use the original
| release of it.. the later version on the site which was
| done by someone other than the original designer (as far as
| I can tell) stripped out all the hinting so it looks bad if
| you have anti-aliasing turned off. For this reason, I keep
| the original around.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| I always wondered: Why are screenplays written in a
| monospaced font? To me that just looks like an odd relic from
| typewriter times. Is there any better explanation?
| munificent wrote:
| _> To me that just looks like an odd relic from typewriter
| times._
|
| This is the initial reason. It persists because it is part
| of the shorthand filmmakers use to estimate time from text.
| A page of screenplay translates to about a minute of screen
| time. That conversion is _deeply_ ingrained in Hollywood.
| Everyone will look at the page count of a screenplay and
| make assumptions about the running time of the resulting
| film.
|
| If you change the font metrics, that conversion breaks and
| it would confuse the hell out of everyone. And if different
| screenplays (or different drafts of the same one) use
| different metrics then you lose the ability to compare
| their length just using page counts.
|
| It's important to remember that screenplays are real
| physical working artifacts. In the production of a film,
| people will be carrying around dog-eared copies of it. The
| director will say things like, "We're going to try to get
| through three pages today." Pages are a real concept, not
| just an arbitrary subdivision of a continuous string of
| text.
|
| Also the font is part of film culture at this point. Using
| a different font would convey that you are an outsider or
| don't care about the norms and history of cinema. It's
| exactly how when you see a page set in Computer Modern you
| think, "Ah, this is a _real_ CS paper. " A screenplay not
| set in Courier would look like a fraud.
|
| If it makes you feel better, John August has a slightly
| more modern font that preserves the exact metrics of 12
| point Courier:
|
| https://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime
| mcguire wrote:
| True story:
|
| E. Allen Emerson, later Turing Award recipient, comes knocking
| at the door of the Unix cave[1] and demands to know why we
| changed all the fonts and made his papers look different. No
| one had changed the fonts---the department had replaced the
| printers. CMR is wildly different at 600dpi from 300dpi.
|
| Personally, I never really liked Computer Modern mostly because
| the variation in stroke widths was too great. The thin strokes
| just look spindly. Personally, I much prefer Computer Concrete,
| which looks horrible in the samples on the web page.
|
| [1] Where UTCS' Unix sysadmins live.
| jcelerier wrote:
| No, it's terrible and makes reading 1990-2000 era paper a PITA.
| kpfonts ftw
| gmac wrote:
| No, I also don't like it. I use LaTeX for papers, and I tend to
| go for Palatino.
|
| But there's also an annoyingly performative aspect to it, at
| least in Economics. Using a recognisable LaTeX font carries an
| implicit "look at me: I'm smart and technical enough to use
| LaTeX".
|
| One result of this is that almost every Economics presentation
| you see is done with Beamer; which lends itself to dense text,
| bullet points and equations; which are almost never the best
| way to present your work.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > almost every Economics presentation you see is done with
| Beamer; which lends itself to dense text, bullet points and
| equations
|
| I don't think that has anything to do with Beamer. That's how
| economists present for some horrible reason. When I was on
| the job market about 20 years ago, the overhead projector was
| the only tool universally available for presentations, and I
| had a couple people comment that my work would be discounted
| by some because it was too easy to understand. That was back
| when I mistakenly thought the point of the presentation was
| to explain my research.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _I had a couple people comment that my work would be
| discounted by some because it was too easy to understand_
|
| Haha, either they discount it because they understood it,
| or they respect it but don't know it. In either case, it's
| like they never saw the presentation.
| Someone wrote:
| In medicine, the slide projector was very common, because
| they tended to want to display photographs.
|
| I think that's what drove the defaults of PowerPoint, with
| its white text on a dark blue background (see
| https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
| msg?msg_id=... for arguments as to why that's good for
| slide projections. I think it also minimizes contrast
| differences between typical "medical conference" photo and
| text slides. That's important in a darkened room , which
| they had to use because projectors weren't bright enough
| yet.
| rmah wrote:
| You aren't the only one. There's something subtly "wrong" about
| the typefaces. Likely because it's "scientifically designed"
| rather than simply designed. IMO typeface design is an art, not
| a science. And it requires talent, aesthetic awareness, and
| design sensibility to get them to look right.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Computer Modern was in fact designed by a
| designer and not "scientifically designed" whatever the heck
| that would mean.
| pavlov wrote:
| Computer Modern was designed by Donald Knuth who is a
| computer scientist, not a typographer. He created CM as a
| demo of his parametric font engine Metafont.
|
| So it's fair to say that CM is a tech demo, not a
| professionally designed font.
|
| Font designer Jonathan Hoefler has commented on Metafont:
| "Knuth's idea that letters start with skeletal forms is
| flawed." When the fundamental design premise is wrong, you
| get something like Computer Modern.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Computer Modern isn't primarily designed using "skeletal
| forms"; that's _one_ way of using Metafont, but not
| heavily used for the CM faces.
|
| While it's true that Knuth is a computer scientist rather
| than a typographer, he has worked pretty closely with
| typographers. And in creating CM, he relied heavily on
| pre-existing (and professionally designed) Monotype fonts
| as a model. (See for example
| https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/monotype-modern, which
| looks quite reminiscent of CM.)
|
| Computer Modern is not to many people's taste today,
| partly because it doesn't reproduce all that well at low
| resolutions, but also, I think, because it is an older
| style that is now out of fashion and not commonly seen.
|
| (The term "Modern" for this type of design dates from the
| 1800s -- see
| https://www.toptal.com/designers/typography/typeface-
| classif... -- so it's hardly surprising that "modern"
| faces like Bodoni or Monotype Modern or CM feel rather
| old-fashioned today!)
| agalunar wrote:
| > Knuth's idea that letters start with skeletal forms is
| flawed.
|
| This is a critique of Metafont, not Computer Modern. And
| interestingly, Knuth et al eventually reached the same
| conclusion; as I recall, most letters in Computer Modern
| are drawn as outlines and then filled in (instead of
| being drawn in a few strokes with a broader pen).
|
| I think Hoefler phrased his comment well; the idea is
| _flawed,_ not necessarily wrong outright. Letterforms
| derive from historical constructions: the uppercase roman
| letters from Roman square capitals, which were carved;
| lowercase from humanist miniscules (from carolingian
| miniscules), written by pen; &c. So in some sense, some
| letters do start with skeletal forms, _but:_ when letters
| were adapted to print, the punches (the "master copies")
| for letters were made by engraving and by using
| counterpunches (reusable tools that create particular
| shapes of negative space in the letter). And that's where
| metal (and digital) type comes from; pens and styli are
| more distant ancestors.
|
| [I'd highly recommend the book _Counterpunch_ by Fred
| Smeijers on this topic!]
|
| [Also, it's fun to look at some of the Arrighi italics
| from the early 16th century. They are astonishingly
| modern - compare it to, say, a heavier weight of Minion
| italic, one of the most popular typefaces used in books
| today!]
|
| Anyway, on to Computer Modern. It's not my favorite
| Scotch roman, but take a look at engineering and
| mathematics books from the 1940s and 1950s for
| comparison. I have several books from the McGraw-Hill
| Electrical and Electronic Engineering Series, and they're
| really, really lovely, and the type is eminently readable
| on the printed page; here's a (somewhat poor) scan of one
| of them:
|
| https://archive.org/details/Vacuum_Tube_and_Semiconductor
| _El...
| agalunar wrote:
| [It's also worth pointing out that Computer Modern was
| not created as a demo, and in fact, it's almost the other
| way round. He wanted better typography for The Art of
| Computer Programming, and created TeX and Computer Modern
| as means to that end (and created Metafont in order to do
| _that_ ).]
| Chris_Newton wrote:
| It's also worth remembering that CM was designed with
| some very specific goals in mind in terms of clearly
| distinguishing a much broader character set than was the
| norm at the time, even at very small sizes. It is still
| arguably the most successful font family ever created
| within its intended niche. Very few font families can be
| used to typeset serious mathematics as legibly as CM, and
| even then, few authors will make the effort to set
| everything with the attention to detail Knuth has.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| The font was designed by Donald Knuth, so I think the
| parent is right. And Knuth did have a "scientific" approach
| to it.
|
| In all cases, Knuth is not a font designer so it's not
| shocking that the font isn't as nice as something like
| Arno.
| merricksb wrote:
| For those curious, discussed here at time of publication:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954882
| korginator wrote:
| CMR has been one of the worst possible fonts that proliferated
| throughout the academic world. I don't understand it, perhaps
| it's just me, but there are dozens of other fonts that are more
| readable on paper and on screen.
|
| There's just something very wrong about the glyphs, the relative
| widths of letters, and the way that some of the letters get sort
| of squished together to make the text nearly unreadable.
|
| I remember way back in the 1990's when I had to get an approval
| from the head of our department to submit my thesis in another
| font because I refused to use CMR.
| kps wrote:
| It's not you. Computer Modern is based on Monotype Modern 8A,
| one of the typefaces available for Monotype's '4-line system'
| of typesetting mathematics. It's a Scotch Roman design, a 19th-
| century fashion that represents the nadir of typographic taste.
| agalunar wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'd call it a _low point_ unless you 're
| simply describing your personal taste; I think there's far
| from uniform concensus that Scotch romans (and other "modern"
| faces, like the didones) were a mistake. I mean, Georgia and
| Miller (both by Matthew Carter, who also did Verdana and
| Tahoma) are both revivals in spirit, used for body copy, and
| they're less than three decades old.
|
| But I'm really glad someone mentioned the Monotype 4-line
| system! Two papers come to mind that might be worth sharing,
| which I thought were really enjoyable and well-done:
|
| https://typeculture.com/academic-resource/articles-
| essays/th...
|
| http://ultrasparky.org/school/pdf/DanielRhatigan_Dissertatio.
| ..
| bruce343434 wrote:
| What's wrong about CMR is the criminally thin parts of some
| glyphs. It's practically unreadable (for me).
| pgtan wrote:
| It is you. CM is based on the Modern fonts used in scientific
| typesetting decades before Knuth made a MF version of it. I had
| often chance to give non-TeX (coming from humanities)
| proofreaders and copy-editors the choice between Times and CM.
| Almost all of them choosed CM.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Computer Modern isn't the most readable font in the first place,
| but these look absolutely terrible on Windows (in Edge, probably
| identical to Chrome) on a ~220dpi display. They're at least
| readable on MacOS/Safari due to Apple's tendency to render fonts
| bolder.
| fdej wrote:
| This version of CM looks too thin. The version that comes with
| KaTeX (https://github.com/KaTeX/katex-fonts) looks great in the
| browser though. Would be nice if someone packaged that font in a
| more user-friendly way.
| jmmcd wrote:
| I love CM, but the italic Lorem Ipsum sample on this page is
| uuuugggggly, so bad that it must be a bug. I hope. I'm on MacOS,
| Firefox 88.
|
| EDIT no wait, I see what has happened. It has turned the
| emphasised text into double-italics, instead of de-italicising
| it. Yuck.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Do you mean the bolded text? The problem there is that the
| @font-face family is set up with just a single weight (no bold-
| italic face is provided), and so the browser applies a
| synthetic bold effect as a fallback.
| jmmcd wrote:
| No, I mean the text that was already italic in the original.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Oh, I think you're referring to the "Computer Modern Serif
| Slanted" sample (not the "Computer Modern Classical Serif
| Italic"), right?
|
| Yes, the @font-face rules for that family have 'font-style:
| normal', whereas they should really have 'font-style:
| oblique' which would have avoided that ugliness.
| jmmcd wrote:
| Ah, yes, that's what I meant. Thanks.
| CarVac wrote:
| I like Computer Modern, but mainly on print or on high DPI
| displays. It looks pretty terrible on low pixel density displays
| because of how thin it is.
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