[HN Gopher] The LaTeX Font Catalogue
___________________________________________________________________
The LaTeX Font Catalogue
Author : the-mitr
Score : 174 points
Date : 2021-07-22 10:40 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tug.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (tug.org)
| the-mitr wrote:
| This has been my go to resource for choosing the fonts before
| starting a new LaTeX project.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| This is great. But how do you use them? I've not ever been able
| to successfully figure out how to bring new fonts a latex doc
| (I use miktek).
| zauguin wrote:
| You really want to use LuaLaTeX (if you don't do so already)
| and then you can just load any font on your system using
| \usepackage{fontspec} \setmainfont{Whatever your
| font's name is}
|
| Especially you don't have to deal with installing old Type 1
| fonts which is messy, especially when they are not included
| in your TeX distribution.
|
| You can also follow the instructions in the catalog which for
| some fonts show how to use them in pdfLaTeX, but these days
| pdfLaTeX mostly makes sense if you want to submit to journals
| which do not accept modern engines and such journals probably
| don't allow you to change the font anyway.
| armalipeddi wrote:
| if you click through to the pages for any of the fonts, there
| is usage instructions and a working example.
| tombert wrote:
| The monsters who make LaTeX don't have Comic Sans. I guess I need
| to stick with XeLaTeX :)
| jansan wrote:
| The legendary CERN slides:
| https://www.slideshare.net/xzxzxz/atlas-higgs-cernseminar201...
| rpmuller wrote:
| I also like this page for latex fonts:
| https://r2src.github.io/top10fonts/
| Topolomancer wrote:
| An excellent resource. With `fontspec` and `xelatex` or
| `lualatex`, choosing a font can sometimes be as easy as this:
| \setmainfont{EB Garamond} \setsansfont{Myriad Pro}
| \setmonofont{IBM Plex Mono}
|
| No additional packages required!
| andrepd wrote:
| Unfortunately XeTeX brings some compatibility problems as well
| as bugs, compared to pdfLaTeX.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Like? Because I've never seen XeLaTeX do something that made
| me go "wow time to go back to the legacy tex-that-
| doesn't-understand-unicode->DVI->PDF route".
| dr_hooo wrote:
| Legacy would be pdflatex in this case, which generates PDFs
| directly and works with unicode without issues. However, I
| would also be interested in cases which xelatex doesn't
| handle too well.
| zauguin wrote:
| These are purely my own opinions and not official
| positions of any groups or organizations I am associated
| with.
|
| The biggest issues with XeTeX (compared mostly with
| LuaTeX, some of them also apply for pdfTeX) in my opinion
| are (roughly ordered for importance) 1.
| the missing support for microtypesetting features,
| especially font expansion 2. Missing support for
| new OpenType features. I consider especially variable
| fonts to be important, but I know that there are also
| many users missing color font features. 3. The font
| selection system which uses completely different lookup
| paths for font names and filenames leads to extreme
| confusion for users, especially since it's system
| dependent. 4. It shares the problem with older
| engines that many things like colors, underlines, etc.
| require special invisible nodes which can influence line-
| breaking in unexpected ways. 5. (From a programmers
| perspective) adding advanced PDF features under XeTeX
| tends to be much more complicated because of the DVI
| based backend which makes it harder to control the PDF
| file directly.
|
| That being said, I would take XeTeX over pdfTeX any day,
| but I don't see much reason to use it if LuaTeX is
| available as an alternative.
| leephillips wrote:
| The reason I switched from LuaTeX, which I agree is
| otherwise superior (and...the Lua thing!), is that it has
| some horrible and well-known bug in its font loading
| mechanism, where if you load a large number of fonts, it
| sucks up enormous memory and CPU resources. I have
| documents that simply grind to a halt if I try to process
| them with LuaTeX, but compile in seconds using XeLaTeX. I
| hope that's fixed now, because I would rather use LuaTeX.
| zauguin wrote:
| The issue is not so much about _many_ fonts, but about
| one _big_ font. The first time a font is loaded it has to
| be analyzed and cached and for some fonts this leads to
| excessive resource usage. You can avoid that in recent
| versions by using a HarfBuzz based font-shaper instead of
| the Lua version: Replace `\setmainfont{Some name}` with
| `\setmainfont[Renderer=HarfBuzz]{Some name}`. The first
| time a bug font is used you might still see a slight
| delay (~1 second?), but it 's orders of magnitude faster
| and does not require so much resources.
| leephillips wrote:
| I'll try it! Thanks a million!
| zauguin wrote:
| Use LuaTeX. It's not bug free, but it is still developed and
| most bugs there get fixed relatively fast. Also it is much
| more flexible anyway.
| dhosek wrote:
| LuaTeX has incorrect default settings, like not breaking at
| - and --. https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/604263/202780
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Are these fonts available for use outside LaTeX? Seems like
| they're spread all over the place instead of collected in one
| repository.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Yes, you click the OTF or TTF link to get the file.
|
| Some of them didn't offer a link but you still can grab them
| from the CTAN repository. You would need to do navigate more to
| get the file. You can get the Type1 and AFM/PFM files (old font
| formats back in the day).You would need to convert those format
| to TTF/OTF because some software don't have support for Type1
| and AFM/PFM files. You can convert them with FontTools
| (python).
| queuebert wrote:
| There are the Tex Gyre fonts, but part of what makes Computer
| Modern in LaTeX look so good is the typesetting quality.
|
| I believe TeX actually solves a convex optmization problem to
| find the optimum inter-word spacing for each line while
| considering every line on the page. That's why you don't get
| those crazy large spacings in LaTeX that you sometimes see in
| Word.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| If you employ the `microtype` package, latex will also be
| able to make adjustments to inter-letter spacing. This can
| improve results by evening out the "weight". The results are
| subtle, though -- nothing like the huge improvements that
| result from switching from msword to latex.
|
| Another slick trick is that latex (really, tex) lets you
| alter the weightings used in the optimization, paragraph by
| paragraph. And you can alter the weightings used in deciding
| where to put page breaks. You can also supply hints on
| hyphenation, for those rare cases in which the engine cannot
| decide what to do. (Note: the system adjusts hyphenation to
| the language, so e.g. those long words in German will be
| handled well.)
|
| The optimization scheme is a large part of what makes tex so
| good. That, and the understanding of mathematical notation.
|
| Anyone who wants to get insights into the early setup of tex
| might enjoy reading the following Knuth (1979). It's a very
| engaging read, for something that's technical. (Generally,
| Knuth is a great writer.)
|
| _References_
|
| Knuth, Donald E. "Mathematical Typography." Bull. Amer. Math.
| Soc. (N.S.) 1, no. 2 (March 1979): 337-72.
| maxnoe wrote:
| One Paragraph, not the whole Page afaik
| leephillips wrote:
| There are whole-page optimizations as well. For example, to
| avoid clashes in color between adjoining paragraphs.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Also hyphenation helps with avoiding large spacings.
| matoyce wrote:
| I always use the San-serif fonts in the catalog. It makes the
| document looks presentable and makes more readable.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Twenty years ago I did typeset a 440 pages or so book using
| LaTeX. Sadly the editor wanted a "conventional" look and not the
| LaTeX one. I ended up using the "Utopia" (it's in the catalogue)
| font as the main font and sneaked as much "LaTeXism" as I could
| without getting caught ; )
|
| The editor also had zero familiarity with Linux / LaTeX (it was
| all QuarkXPress back then) and hence wasn't confident in the
| digital files produced by LaTeX and the converters (say ps2pdf
| etc.) so in the end a high quality print copy ended being
| flashed. So it was still a partly "analog" process even though
| the computer-to-plate age had already started.
|
| Good memories.
| cpach wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what does flash refer to in this context?
| jjgreen wrote:
| Photolithography?
| dhosek wrote:
| Seems likely. I had an issue with issue one of _Serif_
| magazine where I could not move the high resolution scans
| of some images from my computer to the service bureau that
| was generating the film for the printers. We ended up have
| to go old school for that and having the printers
| photograph those pages and strip the image into the film to
| make the plates. This was back in the days of uploading
| files to the service bureau on a 28K modem (maybe I had
| 56K?) and the files wouldn 't fit on the Bernoulli drive I
| had for sneakernetting large files from one place to
| another.
| benrbray wrote:
| book.swf
| stared wrote:
| The default LaTeX font is stunningly beautiful! To the point that
| for me even looking at LaTeX-generated papers in an aesthetic
| experience.
|
| Recently, I was posting a preprint to arXiv. I intentionally
| removed a journal style, which changed the font to Times New
| Roman.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > The default LaTeX font is stunningly beautiful!
|
| You may be alone in that. I think the general consensus is that
| Computer Modern is pretty horrible.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I wonder if it's better for its intended medium (being
| printed rather than displayed on a screen)
| bjoli wrote:
| it is a lot better. Quite a differemt font, even. I never
| bother to change the original in latex for my own things,
| but whenever I have a long paper that I really wat to read
| typeset in CM i make sure to print it.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I don't think "horrible" is a general opinion, although it is
| in the end a matter of taste. But you do often hear people
| who think that the vector derivatives initially made (Knuth's
| originals were raster) are too light for comfortable reading
| on a monitor. There have been some recent uploads to CTAN
| with heavier versions of CM. I remember them as
| https://www.ctan.org/pkg/newcomputermodern (book weight) and
| https://www.ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern.
| JorgeGT wrote:
| They are too thin because they were designed to be printed,
| accounting for the spread of the ink on the paper (gain):
| https://www.levien.com/type/cmr/gain.html
| leephillips wrote:
| These are great, thank you.
|
| EDIT: Do you have any insight into why people still work on
| packages for type-1 fonts? Who still wants to use these,
| and why?
| jimhefferon wrote:
| As contrasted with OpenType? I can't speak for the
| developers of the fonts but when I compile, Type1 is what
| I happen to use. I note that the documentation for the
| MLModern fonts say: OpenType support is planned for a
| future version.
| leephillips wrote:
| Yes, as contrasted with otf/ttf. I think of Type-1 as
| obsolete technology, not often used for new fonts and
| only supporting 256 glyphs per font. But I guess there
| must be some upside that I don't know about.
| zauguin wrote:
| Knuth's original are not really raster fonts, they are
| vectors but in a format which is not supported in other
| systems so they have to be mapped to raster fonts before
| being include e.g. in PDF files. The important difference
| is that you can customize for which resolution they should
| be rasterized, so you can get good looking fonts by setting
| sufficiently high values for your screen and zoom
| requirements. (Of course this doesn't help if you only get
| a finished PDF from someone else and for the Type 1
| variants it's no longer important anyway.)
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Has no one bothered to remake probably the most used font
| in academic publishing in another vector format? If it's
| already in a vector format?
| zauguin wrote:
| People did. I was only talking about the original created
| by Knuth, the fonts used by default in modern TeX
| installations are normal Type 1 vector font versions of
| the font. Most other current variants (like Latin Modern,
| New Computer Modern, etc. which also include OpenType
| versions) are derived from these Type 1 fonts.
| [deleted]
| queuebert wrote:
| I want to hate it because it seems so old fashioned, and I
| constantly search for alternatives, but I keep coming back,
| because no other font allows me to read dense text for hours
| at a time.
|
| I guess this Knuth dude knows his stuff.
| JCWasmx86 wrote:
| I love this font. It looks nice, makes texts more readable
| (At least it feels like that) and is for my purposes
| perfect
| jansan wrote:
| I have a printed copy of Knuth's "Digital Typography" on my
| desk (hardcover from 1999). The table of contents does not
| look too great, but the rest of the book is a piece of art
| in itself.
| mcguire wrote:
| Pro tip: Never name your design/aesthetic style "Modern".
| :-P
| benrbray wrote:
| What?? I've never met anyone who thinks that. Personally I
| think it's a very hard standard to beat. I rarely see a
| document with a non standard font that wouldn't look better
| in computer modern. Especially for math.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| > Personally I think it's a very hard standard to beat.
|
| I wonder if Knuth himself would even agree. Open _Concrete
| Mathematics_ next to a volume of TAOCP and see for
| yourself. It might not be a huge issue for a paper, but
| anything longer typeset in CM (like many PhD theses) could
| benefit from a better font. Even for math, there are pretty
| good alternatives nowadays.
| dhosek wrote:
| The font in Concrete Mathematics, interestingly enough,
| is a reparameterized version of Computer Modern. I'd have
| to look at the MF sources, but if I recall correctly, it
| doesn't have any changes to the actual character
| programs. The "math italic" is the Euler typeface
| designed by Hermann Zapf. While this was implemented in
| Metafont, it is not really a "meta" font. Instead, the
| grad students who worked on this (under the direction of
| Chuck Bigelow and Kris Holmes, IIRC) instead created MF
| outlines for each size independently. There is no shared
| code for different sizes or even for common aspects of
| the characters in the font.
| mcguire wrote:
| It seems that modern type designers don't like Modern
| fonts. Font design, like all design, is a style-based
| endeavor, where things come into and go out of fashion.
| Modern fonts are out, currently.
|
| Personally, Computer Modern is a little spindly for my
| taste (and eyesight). Computer Concrete, on the other
| hand....
| dhosek wrote:
| I remember being at the pool at the hotel during the 1990
| TUG conference and Michael Spivak going on a long tirade
| against the qualities of Computer Modern. There's a reason
| he commissioned the creation of the MathTime fonts.
| magnio wrote:
| Language and glyph support aside, the unbearable thinness
| of Computer Modern makes it very difficult to read on
| screen. Maybe it looks better in print, but for computer
| monitor, Latin Modern is a better alternative IMO.
| coliveira wrote:
| You just need to update your reader. Any decent PDF or
| even DVI software has the ability to display CM in a
| readable way.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That is not true in any way.
|
| First, the main way PDF readers make strokes thicker is
| via hinting, so it depends on how Computer Modern was
| embedded into the PDF for starters.
|
| Second, hinting distorts letterforms so many top-quality
| renderers (like on macOS) don't use it, preferring more
| accurate letterforms instead. And Preview on macOS is
| certainly "decent".
|
| Third, "updating" isn't going to do a thing. Whether
| fonts are rendered as hinted or not is a design decision
| taken when the PDF rendered was built from the ground up.
| No "update" is going to change that.
| tmoertel wrote:
| My understanding is that the "unbearable thinness" is
| what happens when Computer Modern outlines designed to
| accommodate ink swell (associated with older printing
| methods) are used on modern display and raster printing
| surfaces without adjustment. If you check the typography
| in TAoCP, which Knuth fine tuned, it doesn't seem so
| unnaturally thin.
| queuebert wrote:
| Do you happen to know how he fine tuned it? I too would
| like a bit more weight on the font when printed.
| teddyh wrote:
| You are supposed to fine tune the constants yourself for
| your specific printer when installing TeX and METAFONT on
| your system.
|
| The pre-defined modes can be found here:
| ftp://ftp.tug.org/tex/modes.mf
| mcguire wrote:
| Set your printer to 300 dpi.
|
| No, seriously, when UTCS replaced the 300dpi laser
| printers with 600dpi models, Allan Emerson was very upset
| because his papers suddenly looked different. :-)
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| The art of optimizing a typeface for print is pretty
| elaborate, and if you're genuinely interested in learning
| how to do this, https://typedrawers.com is a good place
| to start. It's where all the font engineers, as well as
| foundry owners, hang out.
| zauguin wrote:
| FYI on modern LaTeX engines like LuaLaTeX (and also
| XeLaTeX) Latin Modern actually is the default.
|
| But Latin Modern and the default Type 1 version of
| Computer Modern have exactly the same thickness, so if
| Computer Modern looks thinner for you then it must be
| some weird screen effect. (The hinting is a bit
| different, but I wouldn't have expected that to have a
| significant effect on current systems where hinting is
| often ignored anyway.)
| Blaisorblade0 wrote:
| AFAIK, Wikipedia's info on the Latin Modern regressions
| from Blue Sky is accurate. Neither version is the
| original CM font or has had as much fine-tuning put into
| it, but (EDIT) the Blue Sky version was at least worked
| on by paid professionals.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern#Latin_Moder
| n
| Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
| Yes, it looks thicker in print [1].
|
| [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/lonelyfox/4329034436
| cpach wrote:
| Is that Computer Modern? Wow. Looks very different from
| seeing it in a PDF.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's probably because you're just used to it.
|
| To any professional type designer, it's a _terribly_
| balanced font aesthetically, basically every letterform. It
| looks like a font designed by an engineer, not a designer
| who knows how to create and balance shapes and lines that
| are pleasing and easy to the eye. Which, of course, is
| exactly what it is.
| hosteur wrote:
| I hear that a lot. What are examples of good fonts that
| are free alternatives? And available in latex?
| GiovanniP wrote:
| Tex Gyre Termes could be. For an example, please look at
| https://www.texmacs.org/joris/zcomp/zcomp-abs.html (you
| can download both a pdf and the TeXmacs source---note
| that TeXmacs is not based on TeX, you need to use the
| TeXmacs program to edit it comfortably and to obtain a
| pdf).
| carlinmack wrote:
| Charter is decent
| jjgreen wrote:
| Minion Pro is gorgeous (but commercial, but worth it).
| lottin wrote:
| Horses for courses. A single font will never be adequate
| for every purpose.
| benrbray wrote:
| Do you have any examples of math / engineering texts
| written with Minion Pro? I can mostly find it used for
| title fonts, or with a ton of line spacing.
| arnarbi wrote:
| Here's an old thesis (of mine) in CS, with a bunch of
| inference rules, proofs, etc. (Ignore the standardized
| front matter of ~5 pages)
|
| https://skemman.is/bitstream/1946/7418/1/MSc_Arnar-
| Birgisson...
| adiM wrote:
| Motion Mountain book:
| https://www.motionmountain.eu/index.html (their
| certificate seems to have expired).
|
| PDF copies also available on scribd:
| https://www.scribd.com/lists/2705622/Motion-Mountain-
| Collect...
| benrbray wrote:
| Thanks for the example! I think the scribd pdf viewer has
| some layout issues, but I can now recall that I've seen
| this font in quite a few places before.
|
| It doesn't look _bad_ , but I still don't think it quite
| works for dense paragraphs of text compared to Latin
| Modern. I do really like how it looks on the slideshow in
| a sibling comment, though.
| adiM wrote:
| Aesthetics of a fonts is such a personal feeling. And
| fonts feel different on screen vs print.
| jjgreen wrote:
| A slide deck I did a few years ago:
|
| http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/jjg/pdf/vfplot-
| GUM11.pd...
|
| Oh God, 10 years ago ...
| ska wrote:
| The equation layout in that doesn't look great, but they
| are pretty simple so hard to tell details.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| This seems like a great method for showing direction
| fields. And it's in the Gerris context -- double win!
| leephillips wrote:
| I took a look to see the font, which I agree is
| beautiful.
|
| But I stayed for the content. Interesting! And what a
| great presentation! I have so many questions. What
| happened to this in the intervening decade? Is the idea
| incorporated into any other plotting packages? Did you
| purchase this font to use in your talks?
|
| > Oh God, 10 years ago ...
|
| I know that feeling.
| jjgreen wrote:
| Too kind :-)
|
| The package vfplot [1] is still available and still under
| development, it's rather hard to use in that there are
| lots of parameters to adjust to get decent looking
| output. There's also an issue in that the "dimension
| climbing" approach means putting an ellipse at each
| boundary corner and then as many as you can fit on the
| line-segment between them, there are lots of ways that
| this can fail for complex boundaries (coastlines, for
| example). I think I've fixed this using the fact that "a
| line segment is a degenerate ellipse", so one can
| actually calculate a "distance" between a line-segment
| and an ellipse in almost the same way as one calculates
| the distance between ellipses. The code for this is in a
| branch on GitLab [2], but there is still quite a bit of
| work to do for the 2.0 release (later this year?).
|
| [1]
| http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/jjg/en/code/vfplot/
|
| [2] https://gitlab.com/jjg/vfplot
| cnity wrote:
| Every criticism I've seen of Computer Modern is an appeal
| to authority.
|
| > not a designer who knows how to create and balance
| shapes and lines that are pleasing and easy to the eye
|
| "Your subjective opinion of the font is wrong, because
| you're not an expert." If OP and GP (and honestly, most
| people I know) like the font, how is it not pleasing to
| the eye? What does it mean for the "aesthetics" to be
| "_terribly_" balanced?
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's not an appeal to authority, but rather to shared
| taste.
|
| It's true there's no reference manual for the equations
| for pleasing shapes, because however our preferences are
| expressed in our brain, we haven't been able to decode.
|
| But to give one example to your question: the serifs in
| Computer Modern are thicker than the thin stems of
| letterforms. That's ugly, full stop. It's not balanced --
| the proportions of thicknesses is backwards. The entire
| function of serifs is to _taper_ and /or _finish_ , never
| to _add_ weight.
|
| Or another: the loop (lower part) of the double-story
| lowercase "g" simply extends way too far to the right. It
| makes the letter feel like it's going to tilt and fall
| over to the left. It's not balanced, period.
|
| So these are just two examples of terrible balance. Does
| that hopefully answer your question in a way that isn't
| an appeal to authority?
|
| Edit: curious why I'm being downvoted for this comment,
| when I'm just trying to answer the parent comment with
| actual examples.
| corty wrote:
| The slight unbalance and the not-totally-uniform looks
| make cmr much more readable. The breaking with the
| typesetting tradition makes it better, because it is
| unhindered by such useless flourishes as "must taper" or
| "must look like any other letter fitting into a uniform
| box of equal greying when smudged". cmr does this while
| still looking good and pleasing when viewed in whole
| paragraphs as opposed to single letters.
|
| And where cmr absolutely excels is the accompanying
| greek, math symbols and typesetting. Nothing else comes
| even close in getting it readable, pleasing and uniform.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _The slight unbalance and the not-totally-uniform looks
| make cmr much more readable._
|
| That's frankly a very idiosyncratic take, and not one
| many professionals would agree with.
|
| By that logic, toolbars with icons would become easier to
| use if their icons were all slightly off-center from each
| other -- which is very much not the case.
|
| Part of reading legibility comes from the shapes of
| words, not letters by themselves. Generally speaking, we
| read words -- not letters. When individual letters are
| off balance or especially non-uniform, they draw
| attention to themselves rather than making the word
| coherent as a whole. This, of course, is one of the
| reasons why kerning pairs are so important.
|
| Also, tapering isn't a "flourish" it's just how roman
| serifs work. And "uniform box of equal greying when
| smudged" is neither a flourish nor a rule at all, it
| appears to be something you've invented.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _The serifs in Computer Modern are thicker than the
| thin stems of letterforms._ "
|
| That's true of all serif fonts with thin stems, no?
| crazygringo wrote:
| No. Bodoni is the quintessential thin-stem font, and you
| can see that the serifs are simply a continuation of the
| thin stroke, not any thicker:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=bodoni&tbm=isch
| svat wrote:
| > the serifs in Computer Modern are thicker than the thin
| stems of letterforms.
|
| 1. Is this really true? I went to the bookshelf and
| pulled out three Knuth books, and at least to my eye, the
| serifs don't look noticeably thicker than the letter
| stems in the unbalanced way you mentioned. The exact
| proportions could be found by checking Volume E or
| generating proofs from the Metafont sources (haven't
| tried that), but this seems like the well-known problem
| with the "spindly" Type-1 versions of CM that many people
| use today, than in Knuth's actual Computer Modern as in
| his printed books. (See
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722/48 for pictures.)
|
| 2. Is this any worse in Computer Modern than in Monotype
| Modern, the typeface that Knuth was trying to reproduce?
| This is the font used for TAOCP Vol 1 first edition
| (1968), Vol 2 first edition (1969), Vol 3 first edition
| (1973) and Vol 1 second edition (1973). Those books were
| typeset with hot-metal typesetting (on Monotype
| machines), and in fact when Addison-Wesley approached
| Knuth in 1962 (when he was in grad school) to write a
| book, he was excited because he loved the appearance of
| their books. The publishers' move to phototypesetting
| could not recapture that look, and digital typesetting
| was starting to become feasible, so he took up the
| problem himself: he wanted to reproduce Monotype Modern
| so he needed TeX to typeset it, and Metafont to specify
| it (and Computer Modern was the result).
|
| My guess is that the opinion you're expressing results
| from a combination of both the above:
|
| * Yes, what Knuth was aiming for (Monotype Modern 8A, or
| the look of math textbooks he used as a student, or
| mathematical journals of a certain period:
| https://projecteuclid.org:443/euclid.bams/1183544082 )
| was very much an early 20th-century / late 19th-century
| look, and it seems the fashion in contemporary typography
| circles (I suspect this started with William Morris in
| the 19th century already) to look down on that period and
| all that it entails (like larger spaces between
| sentences: witness Bringhurst's comments about _" In the
| nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age
| in typography and type design"_ etc). So, people _au
| fait_ with modern typographical fashions don 't quite
| like the associated style (Scotch Roman typefaces, etc),
| while many mathematicians quite prefer it.
|
| * The poor Type 1 versions of Computer Modern cause the
| letter stems to appear thin, and even more so on low-
| resolution devices like monitors, causing the serifs to
| appear thicker in comparison.
|
| Personally, comparing Monotype Modern (as in the first
| editions of TAOCP) and Computer Modern (in print, and
| using "true" CM), I don't think Computer Modern looks
| worse than the source typeface in terms of having
| terrible balance or appearing like "a font designed by an
| engineer"; the issue is probably more the "shared taste"
| you mentioned: Knuth's target aesthetic was itself
| different.
| ska wrote:
| > To any professional type designer, it's a terribly
| balanced font aesthetically, basically every letterform.
|
| It works pretty well balanced in print on systems it was
| originally targeted to. The main problem with using other
| fonts in TeX/LaTeX (or anything in, say, Word) is making
| it so complex equations lay out reasonably. Admittedly a
| niche problem, but one one that was the original purpose
| of TeX - and CM works well for it. There are a small
| number of other options that don't screw it up.
| benrbray wrote:
| > It looks like a font designed by an engineer, not a
| designer
|
| This is exactly why I like it. Designed by an engineer
| for the purpose of _typesetting engineering articles and
| books_.
|
| Most of the other alternative fonts feel like they were
| designed by a _designer_ with all the unnecessary flairs
| that would make a great title /heading font to pad the
| portfolio but are needlessly distracting in a paragraph
| of dense technical text interspersed with equations.
|
| Keep in mind that Google / Facebook / Twitter / Apple /
| Microsoft / etc hire hordes of professional designers and
| the result is a horrible user experience for everyone. I
| much prefer Wikipedia and Hacker News to most "modern"
| web design by professionals.
| suprfsat wrote:
| Hacker News is in Verdana, which was designed for
| Microsoft.
| jacobolus wrote:
| By Matthew Carter, a famous type designer who also made
| e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Charter,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galliard_(typeface), and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(typeface),
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_(typeface) any of
| which would be better for long prose documents than
| Computer Modern.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't know where you're getting "unnecessary flair"
| from. What unnecessary flair do fonts like Times New
| Roman or Baskerville or Bodoni have? (Obviously I'm
| comparing with other similar fonts traditionally used for
| body text typesetting with equations.)
|
| I'm talking about good sense of aesthetic proportion and
| balance, not "flair".
|
| And what exactly is the horrible user experience that
| Google has created with Roboto, or Apple with San
| Francisco, or Microsoft with Calibri? They're actually
| quite excellently balanced and pleasing fonts for their
| purposes.
| leephillips wrote:
| You're both wrong. It was designed by a mathematician,
| for use in printing mathematical books.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| > Most of the other alternative fonts feel like they were
| designed by a designer with all the unnecessary flairs
| that would make a great title/heading font to pad the
| portfolio but are needlessly distracting in a paragraph
| of dense technical text interspersed with equations.
|
| Serious alternatives were designed by foundries decades
| or even centuries ago.
| jgon wrote:
| Wasn't Computer Modern created with input from Herman
| Zapf, and Matthew Carter among other titans of
| typography? I don't think Knuth just whipped it up in
| isolation without any feedback, so this whole "it looks
| like a font designed by an engineer" seems both incorrect
| and needlessly arrogant?
| dhosek wrote:
| I don't think Carter had any input. There was some
| (minimal) input from Zapf, mostly with respect to the
| calligraphic capitals. Mostly, Knuth was trying to
| replicate the Monotype Modern. Some of the fonts like
| cmr17 are especially bad (the extrapolation of parameters
| to larger design sizes was not correct). That said, I do
| think that cmtt is a superior typeface for monospace
| typesetting.
| taeric wrote:
| I think it is more a vocal consensus. Granted, most folks
| don't care.
|
| I also think most of the dislike came from bad pdf rendering
| for a long time.
| brummm wrote:
| I have yet to find anything that reads as nicely as Latex
| generated papers with Computer Modern.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| As you point out, there are two variables here: Is it
| processed in LaTeX, or processed in something else, such as
| Word? And is the font Computer Modern, or something else,
| such as Times New Roman?
|
| I think the renderer has much more to do with the
| readability of a paper than the font. The combination of
| LaTeX and Computer Modern is certainly pervasive, but if I
| had to pick one variable, I would rather read papers using
| a different font but rendered in LaTeX, rather than a paper
| using a different renderer to lay out a Computer Modern
| font. For an example of the latter, take a look at this
| paper, rendered in Word, with Computer Modern font and some
| LaTeX-based margins and spacings:
|
| https://www.ticoneva.com/journal_files/DefaultLateX.pdf
| SeanLuke wrote:
| \usepackage{mathpazo} is pretty nice. Palatino plus good
| math fonts.
|
| The problems with CM are twofold. First, it's an
| inconsistent and amateur remake of Modern, especially
| italics. The bowls and straight lines are different angles
| and widths. Second, the postscript converted version used
| on most platforms is weirdly, bizarrely thin compared to
| the original Modern, which does not make for a good reading
| experience.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| And what is that thought based on? Because that sounds like a
| pretty wild claim.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| They're certainly not alone, I'm a huge fan of Computer
| Modern.
| wvh wrote:
| Default LaTeX fonts give me a nasty uncomfortable feeling in
| the stomach by reminding me of Math and CS tests. I'm not
| generally sensitive, so it's somewhat amusing a font can have
| such emotional impact.
|
| As a typeface aficionado I've spent way too much time building
| font catalogues such as this in the early 2000s; it's good to
| see that both quality and quantity of freely available fonts
| has gone up.
| netineti wrote:
| I like the Computer Modern font when printed on paper.
|
| On low DPI screens (e.g. 96 or even 144 DPI), Computer Modern
| feels too thin and spindly.
|
| Recently, I came across the mlmodern
| (https://ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern?lang=en) font. It is a "heavier"
| version of Computer Modern and I use it for all my documents.
| pgtan wrote:
| If you have a certain printer to use, you can tweak the
| Metafont mode for the fonts and create your preferred look.
| The definitions for various printers are in the file modes.mf
|
| For example:
|
| % From {\tt stsmith@ll.mit.edu}, 10 May 93.
|
| % With |fillin=0|, the diagonal of {\tt cmtt10}'s `z' is too
| thin.
|
| % |blacker=.8| too thin, 2 too thick.
|
| mode_def docutech = %\\[ Xerox 8790 or 4045 (600dpi)
|
| mode_param (pixels_per_inch, 600); mode_param
| (blacker, 1); mode_param (fillin, .1);
| mode_param (o_correction, 0.9);
| mode_common_setup_;
|
| enddef;
| dhosek wrote:
| Using the rasterized fonts is very much an edge case these
| days. I'd also note that back when I used to manage this on
| University systems (in the days before dvips would
| automatically call mf to generate needed fonts), it was
| often the case that at lower resolutions (<600dpi), the CM
| code often ran into errors from the necessary mode_def
| parameters. Xerox printers were especially troublesome
| because they used a "write white" strategy for printing. A
| "write black" printer (e.g., the classic HP LaserJet),
| marked the page by using a laser to charge the parts of the
| page that should get toner. A "write white" printer charged
| the whole page, then used the laser to remove the charge
| from the parts of the page that should not get toner. On a
| "write black" printer, a pixel was a little bit bigger than
| its claimed size. On a "write white" printer", a pixel was
| a little bit smaller than its claimed size.
|
| I was supporting Xerox 8700 laser printers at the time and
| the settings for a write white printer inevitably caused
| errors for many characters until I was generating at least
| a .600gf file. I have vague recollections of the same issue
| coming up occasionally even when I was printing to a
| 1200dpi Compaq.
| pgtan wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! Those must be exciting times. I
| remember tweaking the fonts only once for printing my
| diploma thesis back in the 90s; but contrary to the most
| opinions, I made the fonts even lighter, because of the
| ultra white paper, we were obliged to print to. It was a
| very big file due to the 1200dpi rasterized fonts, but
| the result was better than any print shop could produce
| at that time.
| cwales95 wrote:
| Have to agree. Love how the default font looks! Latex documents
| are very pleasant to read.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Computer Modern Roman is a shibboleth. When I used to review
| resumes at Google I'd give extra attention to any resume in
| CMR; we wanted to hire the kind of nerd who has a resume.tex. I
| don't like the look of the font myself and long ago switched to
| Postscript fonts but that's a subjective opinion.
| adiM wrote:
| In the true nerd spirit, shouldn't you check the pdf metadata
| to see if the resume was created by tex. I use TeX (well
| ConTeXt but not LaTeX, but that is a minor difference) for my
| resume, but without using CM or LM fonts. With Luatex, you
| can use any opentype font.
| hedberg10 wrote:
| I would have submitted a Flash based resume out of spite.
| dhosek wrote:
| I used to do my resume in TeX (in fact an ancient resume of
| mine along with the plain TeX macros to format it is on
| CTAN), but I stopped because in most cases, my resume is
| getting slurped into some automated system and if it's
| anything other than a Word document, I end up with a lot of
| pain.
| 8589934591 wrote:
| I use roboto light sans serif font for my resume. Are there
| better alternatives to CM for reading on the screen? I found
| mlmodern so far to be a good alternative, but would like to know
| from others as well.
| necovek wrote:
| Unfortunately, no language coverage is listed for any of the
| fonts: I generally care about fonts I can use both for Serbian
| (Cyrillic) and English texts, including simultaneously
| (programming, maths).
| jtbayly wrote:
| Yes. Greek is what I need to know support for.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| When you follow to the CTAN, there's Topics section on the
| right which has tags for Greek and Cyrillic fonts.
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