The Computer Modern font was designed to incorporate a "blackness" variable that controlled the thickness of its strokes. This provided a way to adjust the desi

The Computer Modern font was designed to incorporate a "blackness" variable that controlled the thickness of its strokes. This provided a way to adjust the design for different printing processes and to accommodate, for example, ink swell or the lack thereof on modern printing devices. Here are some scans by Raph Levien showing the vector design vs. the offset printing in Knuth’s Digital Typography vs. laser printing: https://levien.com/type/cmr/gain.html https://levien.com/type/cmr/gain.html Presumably, the middle version is how Knuth wanted the font to appear on the page. But the bottom version is what we get when we take the digital outlines and render them on a laser printer. Fortunately for us, several people have used the adjustable-blackness feature to make blacker renditions of Computer Modern that are designed to look good when laser printed. MLModern is the one I prefer: > MLModern is a text and math font family with (La)TeX support, based on the design of Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern and the Latin Modern project. It avoids the spindliness of most other Type 1 versions of Computer Modern. For a typeset example of it in use: https://blog.moertel.com/images/public_html/blog/pix-20240601/sampling-with-sql.pdf https://blog.moertel.com/images/public_html/blog/pix-2024060...