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> 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
by 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 agoDo you have any recommendations for good LaTeX fonts?
- flenserboy 3y agoI've been very happy with kpfonts in documents I've made with PDFLaTeX. Otherwise I use XeLaTeX and my choice of font.
- jcelerier 3y agoI 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 agocochineal 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 agoFor 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 agoConcrete Roman solves almost all of those problems. Or at least improves on them.
- teddyh 3y ago> Computer Modern is awful; its optical sizing is all wrong, far too thin and with too much stroke thickness variation. You are supposed to fine tune the font constants yourself for your specific printer when installing TeX and METAFONT on your system. If your pre-generated fonts look awful, try using them on a device similar to the ones which was used by the font packager. The pre-defined modes can be found here: <ftp://ftp.tug.org/tex/modes.mf> 1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917366#27918650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917366#27918650>
- cratermoon 3y agoFrom a quick scan, it appears that file was last updated in September of 2020, but has been around since 1991. https://www.tug.org/applications/fontinst/mail/tex-fonts/1991/msg00010.html https://www.tug.org/applications/fontinst/mail/tex-fonts/199...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]