3 ms·
The CM fonts are great for actual math, mostly because of the matching math characters. The only other near-complete math fonts I know of are Lucida Bright and
by dubya 13y ago
The CM fonts are great for actual math, mostly because of the matching math characters. The only other near-complete math fonts I know of are Lucida Bright and a Times version, neither of which are free. Most of the other free solutions just smoosh something like Palatino for text together with the CM math fonts or use an incomplete math font with CM fallbacks.
- ska 13y agoThis is the real reason. CM works pretty well right out of the box (and by default, so if you don't care that's what you get) for mathematics, very few fonts do and most of those are expensive. What people seem to forget is what a terrible, terrible state of affairs it was that drove Knuth to spend 10 years or whatever on this stuff. Prior to that the options universally sucked. Even now there really aren't many viable alternatives for typesetting mathematics, and TeX/LaTeX is by far the best of them. But it only comes with one (or two if you count Euler) with full symbol support.