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Using Computer Modern on the web (2013)
- lmns 5y agoAm 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.
- Tomte 5y agoThat'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 5y agoThis 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 5y agoLCD-based portable consoles existed. The Sega Nomad ran the same games as the Sega Genesis, which are often said to "require" CRT blur.
- moshmosh 5y agoIf 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 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 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 5y agoI remember two recent uploads to CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern https://ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern and https://ctan.org/pkg/newcomputermodern https://ctan.org/pkg/newcomputermodern. FYI. Never tried them, myself.
- playpause 5y agoWhen 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 5y agoAt least for screenplays there’s Courier Prime [1]. Perhaps a Computer Modern Prime would be popular. 1: https://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/ https://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/
- Sunspark 5y agoCourier 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.
- TuringTest 5y agoIs it this one? [1] It doesn't have a free license like the later version, though. [1] https://en.m.fontke.com/font/21564413/ https://en.m.fontke.com/font/21564413/
- red_trumpet 5y agoI 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 5y ago> 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 https://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime
- jcelerier 5y agoNo, it's terrible and makes reading 1990-2000 era paper a PITA. kpfonts ftw
- gmac 5y agoNo, 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 5y ago> 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.
- Someone 5y agoIn 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=000082 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.
- whatshisface 5y ago>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.
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- rmah 5y agoYou 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 5y agoI'm pretty sure Computer Modern was in fact designed by a designer and not "scientifically designed" whatever the heck that would mean.
- pavlov 5y agoComputer 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.
- agalunar 5y ago> 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_Electronics_Jacob_Millman_1958/ https://archive.org/details/Vacuum_Tube_and_Semiconductor_El...
- teddyh 5y agoThe 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.
- mcguire 5y agoTrue 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.
- zzo38computer 5y agoYou can adjust the parameters to make a new variant of the Computer Modern font if you think that it is too thin or whatever. (However, there are some parameters missing in my opinion (including the shape of the "R"), but it is possible to modify the code to add more if wanted.) I think that Computer Modern is OK for print; it is not so good for screen. (However, it does have better kerning than some screen fonts.)
- CarVac 5y agoI 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.
- m000 5y agoJust 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 5y agoI'm one of those undergrad students :-) What are the better, more current, ways of prepare, say, a thesis document with maths, pictures ?
- bluenose69 5y agoSpringer'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/content/20566/data/v10 https://resource-cms.springernature.com/springer-cms/rest/v1...
- m000 5y agoTBF, 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 https://ctan.org/pkg/plex-otf
- fuklief 5y agoI'm using the following for fonts. \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage[largesc]{newpxtext} \usepackage{newpxmath} \usepackage[supsfam=newpx]{superiors}
- mihaic 5y agoWhile 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.
- merricksb 5y agoFor those curious, discussed here at time of publication: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954882
- jmmcd 5y agoI 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 5y agoDo 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 5y agoNo, I mean the text that was already italic in the original.
- jfk13 5y agoOh, 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 5y agoAh, yes, that's what I meant. Thanks.
- bitwize 5y agoOh, for the love of... Join the 21st century and write your papers in Word, with readable fonts, like everyone else.
- flenserboy 5y agoWord 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 5y agoNote 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.
- lou1306 5y ago21st 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 5y agoGo, learn some (scientific) typography, then try Word, then come again.
- OJFord 5y agoThat 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 5y agoWord 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.
- jfk13 5y agoThe 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 5y agoAnd 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Roman (Not, of course, to be confused with Roman Concrete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete.)
- bcoates 5y agoThe 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
- korginator 5y agoCMR 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.
- pgtan 5y agoIt 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.
- kps 5y agoIt'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 5y agoI'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/the-monotype-4-line-system-for-setting-mathematics/ https://typeculture.com/academic-resource/articles-essays/th... http://ultrasparky.org/school/pdf/DanielRhatigan_Dissertation.pdf http://ultrasparky.org/school/pdf/DanielRhatigan_Dissertatio...
- fdej 5y agoThis version of CM looks too thin. The version that comes with KaTeX (https://github.com/KaTeX/katex-fonts 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.
- 5tefan 5y agoI 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 5y agoIf 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-system-font-on-windows-10/ https://www.howtogeek.com/716407/how-to-change-the-default-s... (I would strongly recommend making a backup of those keys first.)
- 5tefan 5y agoForgot to tell that it's a corporate setup. Not going to happen. But I'll shock the IT guys and put the request in.
- cratermoon 5y agoIs Bookerly even available for download, or is it exclusive of Kindle?
- jimhefferon 5y ago> Bookerly and Atkinson Hyperledgible Most people who use CM are interested in math fonts.
- sgerenser 5y agoComputer 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.
- cpp_frog 5y agoI 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/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/ [1] https://www.mathjax.org/ https://www.mathjax.org/
- mixedmath 5y agoMathJax 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 https://davidlowryduda.com/static/simplemathpage.html [2]: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
- occamrazor 5y agoKaTeX 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 5y agoIf 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/ https://latex.vercel.app/
- leephillips 5y agoMath-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.
- PaulHoule 5y agoSome 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.
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoold url, old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954882
- sneak 5y agoMy 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 5y agoThe link to the cm-unicode project cited in the article is broken. Interested browsers can find it at https://cm-unicode.sourceforge.io/ https://cm-unicode.sourceforge.io/
- dreamcompiler 5y agoComputer 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.
- replwoacause 5y agoFrom reading these comments, it seems I'm in the minority but I really like CM and I consider myself to be a fan of good typography. There's no accounting for taste...
- Jiocus 5y agoI think it's interesting, and I appreciate, that fonts can communicate so much all by themselves, raise all kinds of opinions, a cult following or a shared 'in-culture'. At uni, a friend and I spent ridiculous time 'perfecting' a few Latex documents for minor assignments, so that when handed over to the senior and cool infosec crowd supervising us would give it a quick glance, followed up by a “Is that latex? Looks good.”. Ironic detached praise and humbleness commenced. “It's alright I guess, sure”. I don't think anyone was ever fooled into believing it was anything more than a play on a shared hacker appreciation. Of making the effort for no reason but it being harder than all the sane alternative ways of producing a document (I'm not a mathmaticians). Computer Modern gives me the same feeling. The font not being a modern font is a useful feature if it supports what you want to say. It has enough character that the idea of people using it by accident feels unlikely. People who doesnt's care seem to prefer sans-serifs. I don't find it strange that CM being so intertwined with the tools used by people who requires typesetting, not word processing, would find that there is a level of shared convention. Based on pragmatism or even aesthetics. As someone wrote in this thread, > “When I see Computer Modern I see an author who didn't get distracted choosing a better font.” If we're looking back, there are loads of fonts that literally couldn't have been designed with screens in mind, as screens weren't a thing. I don't that as a reason to dismiss their continued use by whoever see their purpose. Disclaimer: IBM 3270 everything. Computer Modern when celebrating.