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Nonsense. As someone else posted here: "Something about the cm fonts gives them an air of respectability." This means that almost every maths paper they read b

Nonsense. As someone else posted here: "Something about the cm fonts gives them an air of respectability." This means that almost every maths paper they read before was typeset in it, thus to be taken seriously they think they need to be as well. This is cargo culting because it is adopting the trappings of insightful study in the field of mathematics without necessarily doing anything of the sort.

marcosdumay 13y ago
Well, ok, the people reading the text that respect it more are doing cargo cult... But that's a huge piece of non-news. We already know that people don't act rationally, and that if we try to sell something, it must fit our irrationality. Using the font because it looks respectable isn't cargo cult at all. That's the rational thing to do... That is, once you verify that the effect is real.
twotwotwo 13y ago
Well, two things. One, CMR shares some traits with other 'old' fonts (sometimes actually old, other times aiming for a dusty or scholarly air): lots of variation in stroke width, relatively prominent serifs, a 'true italic' where some italic letterforms look much different from their roman counterparts. (Knuth was making these for a textbook, so maybe he went for a look similar to textbooks of the time, at some intuitive level at least.) If you look on Google Fonts, Playfair Display and Old Standard TT do some of those same things in (I think) also aiming for an old-timey air. So, I think some of the "air of respectability" comes in part from traits shared with some other fonts, not just from appearing on math papers. Two, the "feel" and aesthetic aspects of a font mostly do come from memory and associations. nytimes.com doesn't use a serif because it's more readable on the Web or something; they do it because serifs and newspapers go together in most folks' minds. Even the most thought-out arguments about fonts have associations as their bedrock: when Robert Bringhurst laments that a font shows no real axis with its variations in stroke width and therefore fails to evoke calligraphy, the axis he's missing is still important "merely" because of its association with calligraphy. Other than purely technical arguments about readability (which you could dispose of with an A/B test), most opinions about fonts are, one way or another, rooted in associations. So if folks do appreciate CM partly because of their experience with it I don't see anything illegitimate about that (unless maybe it were utterly unreadable, rather than just quirky). You don't have to use or like the CM fonts, but I don't see how anyone's clearly indisputably wrong for liking them either, any more than with any other font.

marcosdumay 13y ago

Well, ok, the people reading the text that respect it more are doing cargo cult... But that's a huge piece of non-news. We already know that people don't act rationally, and that if we try to sell something, it must fit our irrationality. Using the font because it looks respectable isn't cargo cult at all. That's the rational thing to do... That is, once you verify that the effect is real.

twotwotwo 13y ago

Well, two things. One, CMR shares some traits with other 'old' fonts (sometimes actually old, other times aiming for a dusty or scholarly air): lots of variation in stroke width, relatively prominent serifs, a 'true italic' where some italic letterforms look much different from their roman counterparts. (Knuth was making these for a textbook, so maybe he went for a look similar to textbooks of the time, at some intuitive level at least.) If you look on Google Fonts, Playfair Display and Old Standard TT do some of those same things in (I think) also aiming for an old-timey air. So, I think some of the "air of respectability" comes in part from traits shared with some other fonts, not just from appearing on math papers. Two, the "feel" and aesthetic aspects of a font mostly do come from memory and associations. nytimes.com doesn't use a serif because it's more readable on the Web or something; they do it because serifs and newspapers go together in most folks' minds. Even the most thought-out arguments about fonts have associations as their bedrock: when Robert Bringhurst laments that a font shows no real axis with its variations in stroke width and therefore fails to evoke calligraphy, the axis he's missing is still important "merely" because of its association with calligraphy. Other than purely technical arguments about readability (which you could dispose of with an A/B test), most opinions about fonts are, one way or another, rooted in associations. So if folks do appreciate CM partly because of their experience with it I don't see anything illegitimate about that (unless maybe it were utterly unreadable, rather than just quirky). You don't have to use or like the CM fonts, but I don't see how anyone's clearly indisputably wrong for liking them either, any more than with any other font.