8 ms·

This is one reason why I respect LaTeX so much, and why I can often spot documents written using MS Word a mile away. The idea that it doesn’t matter, that huma

by plg 3y ago

This is one reason why I respect LaTeX so much, and why I can often spot documents written using MS Word a mile away. The idea that it doesn’t matter, that humans are not sensitive to or affected by these things, is plainly false. If I’m reading a long document, it matters. It may not matter ‘objectively’ but … I am human and it does affect me. The corollary is, if I’m writing a document that I know others will be judging (e.g. a research grant application or a scientific publication) I will absolutely 100% do what I can to make it a more pleasant experience for the reader, including using LaTeX for text rendering. I may change (or not) the default font, but for text rendering and all the tiny decisions about spacing, kerning, etc, I will trust LaTeX over MS Turd any day. Sure, “it shouldn’t matter”, a reader ought to judge my ideas and not be affected by this other stuff —- but, alas, the reader (for now ;) ) is human, and we are affected by this stuff.

chrismorgan 3y ago
> I may change (or not) the default font Please do. Computer Modern is awful; its optical sizing is all wrong, far too thin and with too much stroke thickness variation. On some common system and rendering configurations, it’s genuinely not far off illegible at common sizes. Its shapes were designed for printers that (a) had much higher resolution than most screens do, and (b) exhibited at least a moderate degree of glyph dilation (e.g. ink bleed). These days, it’s OK in print (still too thin, since printers are more precise in this way than they used to, which essentially makes everything a bit thinner than it used to be; but not too troublesomely), but really bad on screen for many renderers. Vaguely similar story on Courier New, which was badly digitised in a way that made it far thinner than it should be (due to not taking into account extra weight added by the typewriter’s ink ribbon), and so Windows includes all kinds of hacks to make it somewhat less intolerable (radical changes in hinting, and special-casing in ClearType), but half of those hacks don’t work any more (or work inconsistently) due to how things are done these days. Before anyone jumps on me saying they love Computer Modern and it looks fine to them: I’m focusing on the objective parts. On some screens with some software, it looks tolerable, despite clearly not matching most fonts’ ideas of what a regular weight should be. But on more configurations, it’s dreadful. I’m not talking about the rigid shapes and weird curly bits and such, which I also incidentally dislike, because that’s more subjective. But the weight stuff and the extreme stroke thickness variation stuff, that’s objective.
- hmry 3y ago
  Do you have any recommendations for good LaTeX fonts?
  - flenserboy 3y ago
    I've been very happy with kpfonts in documents I've made with PDFLaTeX. Otherwise I use XeLaTeX and my choice of font.
  - jcelerier 3y ago
    I really like the ADF fonts. My go-to are Gillius ADF, Tribun ADF Std. I also often use Bergamo and Arimo. Before this I used kpfonts.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    cochineal for serif should cover most western languages https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/cochineal/ https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/cochineal/; source sans pro for sans; inconsolata for code.
  - blt 3y ago
    \usepackage{libertine} will give you the font used by ACM journals/proceedings, which looks really nice to my eyes. It's less "severe"-looking than Computer Modern.
  - vincent-manis 3y ago
    For documents intended to be read on-screen, I've had very pleasant results with Merriweather, Merriweather Sans, and Cascadia Code (for monospacing). Mind you, I use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, which make using arbitrary fonts easy. My math text is still in Computer Modern; I still have to go look at various pairings to see what I like the best.
- photonerd 3y ago
  Concrete Roman solves almost all of those problems. Or at least improves on them.
- teddyh 3y ago
PaulHoule 3y ago
My feelings about LaTeX are mixed. I think an abstract or a one page report in LaTeX looks great (I remember always getting a great grade for any homework I set w/ LaTeX as an undergrad.) The thought of reading a whole book in Computer Modern Roman makes my eyes ache though. I think CMR has too many high spatial frequency details that tire me out after a while. I appreciate the optimization algorithms that LaTex uses to lay out words into lines and lines into pages. I have my own program I’ve written that I use to draw the back side of “three sided cards” like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110409706406856531 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110409706406856531 Everything is manual with a few affordances that make common tasks simple, one interesting feature is layout for vertical CJK text which is less impressive than it sounds since CJK characters are all square. Sometimes I think about coupling a general purpose SMT optimizer to it, but it’s not the highest priority.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Computer Modern is an abomination, the Comic Sans of software engineering. Well, that's not really fair to Comic Sans — at least it was designed by a professional for a very specific purpose. Computer Modern is an amateur creation from the stone age of digital typography, and the only reason it persists is the silly computer science education cargo cult around it. You won't find a professional type designer with kind words to say about Computer Modern (though they are generally too polite to say anything about it).
  - teddyh 3y ago
    > You won't find a professional type designer with kind words to say about Computer Modern (though they are generally too polite to say anything about it). “Everyone agrees with me, but nobody will say it publicly.”
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      I thin most people involved with type are pursuing other markets and don’t think a whole lot about the TeX universe.
mwcampbell 3y ago
> Sure, “it shouldn’t matter”, a reader ought to judge my ideas and not be affected by this other stuff —- but, alas, the reader (for now ;) ) is human, and we are affected by this stuff. Reading this as a visually impaired person (legally blind but with some usable vision), I can't help but think that normal vision might actually be an impairment sometimes. What if documents with high-stakes judging had to be submitted in strictly semantic HTML, with all styles or legacy presentational tags forbidden, and read by each reviewer with their preferred settings?
kccqzy 3y ago
In high school I easily got all my writings and reports to have a higher-than-average grade despite an average quality of writing, just by having the best quality of typography with LaTeX. Yes I did change the font, to some pirated Adobe Font Folio fonts. I loved full justification but hated hyphenation so much that I would rephrase my sentences to avoid hyphenation. I can't remember if the microtype package was a thing but I probably used it. I most definitely made the left and right margins different according to odd and even pages.

by plg 3y ago

chrismorgan 3y ago

> I may change (or not) the default font Please do. Computer Modern is awful; its optical sizing is all wrong, far too thin and with too much stroke thickness variation. On some common system and rendering configurations, it’s genuinely not far off illegible at common sizes. Its shapes were designed for printers that (a) had much higher resolution than most screens do, and (b) exhibited at least a moderate degree of glyph dilation (e.g. ink bleed). These days, it’s OK in print (still too thin, since printers are more precise in this way than they used to, which essentially makes everything a bit thinner than it used to be; but not too troublesomely), but really bad on screen for many renderers. Vaguely similar story on Courier New, which was badly digitised in a way that made it far thinner than it should be (due to not taking into account extra weight added by the typewriter’s ink ribbon), and so Windows includes all kinds of hacks to make it somewhat less intolerable (radical changes in hinting, and special-casing in ClearType), but half of those hacks don’t work any more (or work inconsistently) due to how things are done these days. Before anyone jumps on me saying they love Computer Modern and it looks fine to them: I’m focusing on the objective parts. On some screens with some software, it looks tolerable, despite clearly not matching most fonts’ ideas of what a regular weight should be. But on more configurations, it’s dreadful. I’m not talking about the rigid shapes and weird curly bits and such, which I also incidentally dislike, because that’s more subjective. But the weight stuff and the extreme stroke thickness variation stuff, that’s objective.

hmry 3y ago
Do you have any recommendations for good LaTeX fonts?
- flenserboy 3y ago
  I've been very happy with kpfonts in documents I've made with PDFLaTeX. Otherwise I use XeLaTeX and my choice of font.
- jcelerier 3y ago
  I really like the ADF fonts. My go-to are Gillius ADF, Tribun ADF Std. I also often use Bergamo and Arimo. Before this I used kpfonts.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  cochineal for serif should cover most western languages https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/cochineal/ https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/cochineal/; source sans pro for sans; inconsolata for code.
- blt 3y ago
  \usepackage{libertine} will give you the font used by ACM journals/proceedings, which looks really nice to my eyes. It's less "severe"-looking than Computer Modern.
- vincent-manis 3y ago
  For documents intended to be read on-screen, I've had very pleasant results with Merriweather, Merriweather Sans, and Cascadia Code (for monospacing). Mind you, I use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, which make using arbitrary fonts easy. My math text is still in Computer Modern; I still have to go look at various pairings to see what I like the best.
photonerd 3y ago
Concrete Roman solves almost all of those problems. Or at least improves on them.
teddyh 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago

My feelings about LaTeX are mixed. I think an abstract or a one page report in LaTeX looks great (I remember always getting a great grade for any homework I set w/ LaTeX as an undergrad.) The thought of reading a whole book in Computer Modern Roman makes my eyes ache though. I think CMR has too many high spatial frequency details that tire me out after a while. I appreciate the optimization algorithms that LaTex uses to lay out words into lines and lines into pages. I have my own program I’ve written that I use to draw the back side of “three sided cards” like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110409706406856531 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110409706406856531 Everything is manual with a few affordances that make common tasks simple, one interesting feature is layout for vertical CJK text which is less impressive than it sounds since CJK characters are all square. Sometimes I think about coupling a general purpose SMT optimizer to it, but it’s not the highest priority.

pavlov 3y ago
Computer Modern is an abomination, the Comic Sans of software engineering. Well, that's not really fair to Comic Sans — at least it was designed by a professional for a very specific purpose. Computer Modern is an amateur creation from the stone age of digital typography, and the only reason it persists is the silly computer science education cargo cult around it. You won't find a professional type designer with kind words to say about Computer Modern (though they are generally too polite to say anything about it).
- teddyh 3y ago
  > You won't find a professional type designer with kind words to say about Computer Modern (though they are generally too polite to say anything about it). “Everyone agrees with me, but nobody will say it publicly.”
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I thin most people involved with type are pursuing other markets and don’t think a whole lot about the TeX universe.

mwcampbell 3y ago

> Sure, “it shouldn’t matter”, a reader ought to judge my ideas and not be affected by this other stuff —- but, alas, the reader (for now ;) ) is human, and we are affected by this stuff. Reading this as a visually impaired person (legally blind but with some usable vision), I can't help but think that normal vision might actually be an impairment sometimes. What if documents with high-stakes judging had to be submitted in strictly semantic HTML, with all styles or legacy presentational tags forbidden, and read by each reviewer with their preferred settings?

kccqzy 3y ago

In high school I easily got all my writings and reports to have a higher-than-average grade despite an average quality of writing, just by having the best quality of typography with LaTeX. Yes I did change the font, to some pirated Adobe Font Folio fonts. I loved full justification but hated hyphenation so much that I would rephrase my sentences to avoid hyphenation. I can't remember if the microtype package was a thing but I probably used it. I most definitely made the left and right margins different according to odd and even pages.