> On the one hand, it is to my eyes one of the ugliest fonts designed during the 20th century; on the other, my experience of it as a reader (hence again, my ey

> On the one hand, it is to my eyes one of the ugliest fonts designed during the 20th century; on the other, my experience of it as a reader (hence again, my eyes) is that it is one of the easiest to read fonts ever created. For me it's the exact opposite. I find the font to be beautifully designed and perfect for mathematical typesetting (e.g., it properly distinguishes ν and v for instance). However, it's terrible for on-screen reading and printing using laser printers because of how spindly the glyphs are. Indeed, Knuth designed CMR for the printers of the 1980s [1]. The most carefully designed math fonts IMHO are the MathTime fonts [2] designed by Michael Spivak to use in conjunction with Times. It isn't a free font however. (For a sample see this paper [3] published in the Annals of Mathematics.) MathTime is also a perfect example of yak shaving. Spivak was dissatisfied with most available fonts when he set out to update his book on calculus so he basically learned type design from the scratch [4]. I also really like the Fourier fonts (meant to be used with Adobe's Utopia) designed by Michel Bovani and I recently came across a book on statistical mechanics [5] that uses them, which I thought was typeset beautifully. [1]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722 [2]: https://pctex.com/mtpro2.html https://pctex.com/mtpro2.html [3]: https://annals.math.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/annals-v171-n3-p08-p.pdf https://annals.math.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/annals-... [4]: https://tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/spivak/spivak.pdf https://tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/spivak/spivak.pdf [5]: http://www.unige.ch/math/folks/velenik/smbook/Statistical_Mechanics_of_Lattice_Systems.pdf http://www.unige.ch/math/folks/velenik/smbook/Statistical_Me...