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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 woul

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.

magnio 5y ago
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.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 5y ago
  Yes, it looks thicker in print [1]. [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/lonelyfox/4329034436 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lonelyfox/4329034436
  - cpach 5y ago
    Is that Computer Modern? Wow. Looks very different from seeing it in a PDF.
- tmoertel 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Do you happen to know how he fine tuned it? I too would like a bit more weight on the font when printed.
    - teddyh 5y ago
      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
    - TheRealPomax 5y ago
      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 https://typedrawers.com is a good place to start. It's where all the font engineers, as well as foundry owners, hang out.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      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. :-)
- zauguin 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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_Modern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern#Latin_Modern
- coliveira 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
crazygringo 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I hear that a lot. What are examples of good fonts that are free alternatives? And available in latex?
  - jjgreen 5y ago
    Minion Pro is gorgeous (but commercial, but worth it).
    - benrbray 5y ago
      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.
      - jjgreen 5y ago
        A slide deck I did a few years ago: http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/jjg/pdf/vfplot-GUM11.pdf http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/jjg/pdf/vfplot-GUM11.pd... Oh God, 10 years ago ...
        leephillips 5y ago
        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.
hocuspocus 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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.
dhosek 5y ago
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.
mcguire 5y ago
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....
dan-robertson 5y ago
Maybe you and the people you know are very used to computer modern? Complaints I hear often compare it to the fonts (and typesetting in general) of people’s preferred printers from before computer typography, so a particular typeface provided by monotype and set by a particular press. I think a modern typeface (that is, one with contrast between thin and thick strokes among other things) is more acceptable on computers now that high-dpi displays are more common, but the resolution still isn’t perfect and that style isn’t so fashionable in most cases today. Personally I dislike the shape of the lower case Roman t (the curl at the bottom is way too long and comes too high) and I dislike the italic u and v (as I can’t tell them apart). I think the serifs on the capital T come too low as well. The wide array of mathematical symbols in latex don’t always go with the font and they can fail to go together well but that is a separate problem (many fonts won’t include them and the symbols weren’t all designed together.)
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
I used to use LaTeX in my physics days, including my phd thesis. I recently compiled a document, 20 years later, and find the font horrible. I was probably used to computer modern and did not realize how awful it was. There were not tons of good fonts easily useable either, that could be another reason.

magnio 5y ago

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.

Mikhail_Edoshin 5y ago
Yes, it looks thicker in print [1]. [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/lonelyfox/4329034436 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lonelyfox/4329034436
- cpach 5y ago
  Is that Computer Modern? Wow. Looks very different from seeing it in a PDF.
tmoertel 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Do you happen to know how he fine tuned it? I too would like a bit more weight on the font when printed.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    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
  - TheRealPomax 5y ago
    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 https://typedrawers.com is a good place to start. It's where all the font engineers, as well as foundry owners, hang out.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    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. :-)
zauguin 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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_Modern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern#Latin_Modern
coliveira 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

crazygringo 5y ago

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 5y ago
I hear that a lot. What are examples of good fonts that are free alternatives? And available in latex?
- jjgreen 5y ago
  Minion Pro is gorgeous (but commercial, but worth it).
  - benrbray 5y ago
    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.
    - jjgreen 5y ago
      A slide deck I did a few years ago: http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/jjg/pdf/vfplot-GUM11.pdf http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/jjg/pdf/vfplot-GUM11.pd... Oh God, 10 years ago ...
      - leephillips 5y ago
        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.

hocuspocus 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
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.

dhosek 5y ago

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.

mcguire 5y ago

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....

dan-robertson 5y ago

Maybe you and the people you know are very used to computer modern? Complaints I hear often compare it to the fonts (and typesetting in general) of people’s preferred printers from before computer typography, so a particular typeface provided by monotype and set by a particular press. I think a modern typeface (that is, one with contrast between thin and thick strokes among other things) is more acceptable on computers now that high-dpi displays are more common, but the resolution still isn’t perfect and that style isn’t so fashionable in most cases today. Personally I dislike the shape of the lower case Roman t (the curl at the bottom is way too long and comes too high) and I dislike the italic u and v (as I can’t tell them apart). I think the serifs on the capital T come too low as well. The wide array of mathematical symbols in latex don’t always go with the font and they can fail to go together well but that is a separate problem (many fonts won’t include them and the symbols weren’t all designed together.)

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

I used to use LaTeX in my physics days, including my phd thesis. I recently compiled a document, 20 years later, and find the font horrible. I was probably used to computer modern and did not realize how awful it was. There were not tons of good fonts easily useable either, that could be another reason.