the author has rather strong opinions about a lot of stuff, so pretty much everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt. that is, it's mostly a matte

the author has rather strong opinions about a lot of stuff, so pretty much everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt. that is, it's mostly a matter of opinion. one of the most beautifully typeset mathematics books, namely michael spivak's calculus, is typeset in baskerville, which is very similar to times new roman. basically no one in their right mind can claim spivak to be apathetic and sloppy, since he dedicated a massive amount of time to design his own tex math fonts. spivak writes about this here: https://tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/spivak/spivak.pdf https://tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/spivak/spivak.pdf i have actually bought his fonts and use them. i have a passing interest in fonts, but am by no means an expert. i choose the low-hanging fruit when i can, such as buying the mathtime professional fonts for use in my LaTeX documents or switching dr. racket (the racket ide) to use consolas instead of its default font. that being said, i find butterick's font choice to be against my own aesthetic. he seems to really like tall, squeezed fonts, and he often plays with font color in ways that i don't like, such as grayed out blacks and colors against white or off-white backgrounds. i have always found it hard to read. for example, in his beautiful racket book, you can use a color picker to show that his blacks are not black and have been reduced. i don't know what purpose this serves. you can also see the grayed out look on the redesigned racket site (https://racket-lang.org/ https://racket-lang.org/). it makes things very washed out when reading. another example is that in the below link, look at the "l", "h", "d", and "f" when zoomed in. they all have this slant at the top, but on the f, it almost looks like a rendering bug or issue. when reading at regular zoom, it makes things look just off. it makes reading such fonts more tiring because there's little things like that you have to unconsciously process. https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/from-br-to-racket-base.html#macro-definitions https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/from-br-to-racket-base.... all that to say, it seems font choices, like many things, are rather personal. i personally prefer things that don't seem so designed. most of his fonts seem heavily designed. so, such hard ultimatums like what you quoted should basically be ignored.