I would recommend most fonts that Michael Sharpe worked on. He did some nice refinements on already-decent fonts, often to bring copies closer to the original[1]. Heck, I’d recommend them outside of LaTeX, too.
Favorites out of those are XCharter, ScholaX, Etbb and Erewhon.
Also have a look at Algol Revived, which is a remake of a font made for French Algol 60 books by famed type designer, Adrian Frutiger.
The Bembo variant I used for Dercuano, Derctuo, and Dernocua (without LaTeX) is Edward Tufte's ET Book, linked in the article, using the old-style numerals variant. Unfortunately its Unicode coverage is very limited. Fortunately, URW Palladio L (URW's freely-licensed version of Palatino) has fine Unicode coverage, so I used that and Palatino as fallbacks. Unfortunately ET Book's metrics are not very comparable to URW Palladio L's, leading to letter size mismatches when letters mix; its x-height is especially different.
The other big problem you can see on that PDF page is that I chose Latin Modern Typewriter Condensed (lmtlc) for fixed-width text so that I could get 80 columns onto the narrow cellphone screens I was targeting with the PDF, but lmtlc completely omits, for example, Greek, so the examples using Greek are totally screwed up.
The formula display in that note is definitely worse than LaTeX would do, but I flatter myself to think that my half-assed Python script still produced better-looking math output than I usually see from Microsoft Word.
My standard font package is "mathpazo", which is Palatino with maths support. I obviously like Palatino - and if it isn't available, Garamond is similar.
If ever have to do much LaTeX again though, I'll check out the alternatives because the mess of partially compatible modules and the troubles with figure placement are still bad in LaTeX.
It’s hard to see Palatino and Garamond as similar, but perhaps that’s just my typographic training at play. Palatino is much closer to its calligraphic origins than Garamond and has a darker color on the page (the seldom seen Palatino Book weight is a great improvement over the Palatino Medium that’s the default Palatino weight for extended text).
Note also that Palatino was originally designed for Linotype hot metal typesetting and has incorporated in its design the limitations of that system (which, in some ways is actually a bonus for naïve digital setting where ligatures may be limited or non-existent). The most obvious case of this is the lack of character kerns—that is, characters cannot extend beyond their typeset width. This makes the italics look cramped since, e.g., d, l and f cannot reach over the following letter with their ascenders.
Something like Palatino (or even Computer Modern Roman) for body text.
But for headings, humble Helvetica looks good, and a bit less "academic". (I really dislike the default CMR at large point sizes.)
For monospace bits, again I dislike the unusual-looking TeX default, so something serifed or otherwise clearly unambiguous (for "1" and "l", "0" and "O"), and thick enough to be legible (some Courier are too thin). Inline, at a slightly smaller point size than body text, to look proportional, and maybe a little smaller in code blocks.
For a book, I was thinking something slightly flashier for headings, at least on chapters, maybe Linux Biolinum.
I've heard so much praise for The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, but why, I'll never know. I bought it after hearing someone rave about it, and I'll be damned if I didn't hate every page of the book. It felt like a rebuff to The Design of Everyday Things.
The former is currently sitting in my car, and I'll be trying to offload it to someone who actually wants it.
VDQI explains why chartjunk is bad, and if it reduces the amount of chartjunk in the world, that is good. Many maintain a soft spot for VDQI probably because it's their first a-ha moment in terms of appreciating graphic communication. Certainly there are other directions one could go but most people are not designers. Although, I don't see the same contradiction between DOET and VDQI, I'm curious what you mean about that.
I'm curious. Why do you feel like Tufte's book is a "rebuff" of Norman's book? I've read both and find them complementary in many senses. The one criticism that I have found by Norman of Tufte's work is that Tufte preferred high "data density" but Norman argues that this is not always appropriate.
Norman talks a good deal about cognitive load and that good design is intuitive. Ideally, you shouldn't notice good design because it's near invisible.
OTOH, I recall Tufte going on and on about cutting the "data-ink ratio" to the point of making graphs that we generally understand at a glance suddenly very unintuitive. I can dig into the book again if necessary, but I recall he essentially argued that box-and-whisker plots became just a few dots. There's meaning conveyed by the boxes and the whiskers, and changing that convention - even if it uses more ink than absolutely necessary - adds significant cognitive load.
I might pay the karma tax on this one but I've come to really appreciate "Times New Roman" (or TeX Gyre Termes + STIXTwoMath).
Like the OP, I used to care a lot about fonts. Heck, at some point my Windows boot time got slowed down because of the sheer number of fonts it had to load!
I used to think the default Latex font gives off a "serious" and "scientific" vibe. And I thought to myself: why would anyone ever use TNR when more "soulful" fonts exist?
Now that I'm older (33), I resort back to TNR or TeX Gyre Termes but with one change: I add "FakeBold" to text to make it look like old papers and books: https://x.com/OrganicGPT/status/1920202649481236745/photo/1. I just want my text to convey my thoughts, and I don't want any fancy "serifness" get in the way (so no to Bembo and Palatinno).
I think a big part of that is that Bodoni-style fonts don’t do so well at low resolutions (and 300 dpi counts as low resolution). It’s somewhat akin to the problem of Optima which loses much of its subtlety when laserprinted even at high resolutions. Bodoni and Didot both call for fine hairlines which lose their grace at screen resolutions and don’t really do that great at laserprinter resolutions either (at 300dpi, with “writes white” laser technology where the whole page is charged and the laser removes the charge from the white parts of the page, the hairlines of CM would often vanish necessitating the “writewhite” hack for the printer modes for those printers).
Indeed. To add some detail—Didone typefaces (th have very high contrast between thick and thin strokes, which at low resolutions seriously affects readability as the thin strokes either disappear altogether, or are badly hinted and anti-aliased.
I’m a fan of the closely related Poliphilus which is a somewhat more rumpled interpretation of the same sources.
Really, the whole Stanley Morison–era catalog of Monotype designs is great stuff. I think the only collection of type designs that rivals it is perhaps the Sumner Stone–era Adobe originals.
Quite fond of kpfonts. As much as I use XeTeX because of OpenType, I find myself going back to PDFLaTeX so I can get the benefits of Microtype. I tried some of my docs through LuaTeX, but the results, while fine, were still inferior to the two options above.
I would recommend most fonts that Michael Sharpe worked on. He did some nice refinements on already-decent fonts, often to bring copies closer to the original[1]. Heck, I’d recommend them outside of LaTeX, too.
Favorites out of those are XCharter, ScholaX, Etbb and Erewhon.
Also have a look at Algol Revived, which is a remake of a font made for French Algol 60 books by famed type designer, Adrian Frutiger.
[1]: https://ctan.org/author/sharpe
The Bembo variant I used for Dercuano, Derctuo, and Dernocua (without LaTeX) is Edward Tufte's ET Book, linked in the article, using the old-style numerals variant. Unfortunately its Unicode coverage is very limited. Fortunately, URW Palladio L (URW's freely-licensed version of Palatino) has fine Unicode coverage, so I used that and Palatino as fallbacks. Unfortunately ET Book's metrics are not very comparable to URW Palladio L's, leading to letter size mismatches when letters mix; its x-height is especially different.
So in, for example, where https://dercuano.github.io/notes/finite-function-circuits.ht... says "Sᵢ ∈ Σ", the "S" is noticeably shorter than the other full-height characters. It looks a little bit better in the half-assed PDF rendering I produced with my hurriedly-written HTML-to-PDF renderer: http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano.20191230.pdf#page=1572
The other big problem you can see on that PDF page is that I chose Latin Modern Typewriter Condensed (lmtlc) for fixed-width text so that I could get 80 columns onto the narrow cellphone screens I was targeting with the PDF, but lmtlc completely omits, for example, Greek, so the examples using Greek are totally screwed up.
The formula display in that note is definitely worse than LaTeX would do, but I flatter myself to think that my half-assed Python script still produced better-looking math output than I usually see from Microsoft Word.
Palatino with Microtype is my go to for all my LaTeX documents. It looks so good.
Microtype is such an insanely good package, I love it
My standard font package is "mathpazo", which is Palatino with maths support. I obviously like Palatino - and if it isn't available, Garamond is similar.
If ever have to do much LaTeX again though, I'll check out the alternatives because the mess of partially compatible modules and the troubles with figure placement are still bad in LaTeX.
It’s hard to see Palatino and Garamond as similar, but perhaps that’s just my typographic training at play. Palatino is much closer to its calligraphic origins than Garamond and has a darker color on the page (the seldom seen Palatino Book weight is a great improvement over the Palatino Medium that’s the default Palatino weight for extended text).
Note also that Palatino was originally designed for Linotype hot metal typesetting and has incorporated in its design the limitations of that system (which, in some ways is actually a bonus for naïve digital setting where ligatures may be limited or non-existent). The most obvious case of this is the lack of character kerns—that is, characters cannot extend beyond their typeset width. This makes the italics look cramped since, e.g., d, l and f cannot reach over the following letter with their ascenders.
Palatino has been my favorite font since it first appeared on the Macintosh.
For LaTeX documents like technical papers...
Something like Palatino (or even Computer Modern Roman) for body text.
But for headings, humble Helvetica looks good, and a bit less "academic". (I really dislike the default CMR at large point sizes.)
For monospace bits, again I dislike the unusual-looking TeX default, so something serifed or otherwise clearly unambiguous (for "1" and "l", "0" and "O"), and thick enough to be legible (some Courier are too thin). Inline, at a slightly smaller point size than body text, to look proportional, and maybe a little smaller in code blocks.
For a book, I was thinking something slightly flashier for headings, at least on chapters, maybe Linux Biolinum.
I've heard so much praise for The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, but why, I'll never know. I bought it after hearing someone rave about it, and I'll be damned if I didn't hate every page of the book. It felt like a rebuff to The Design of Everyday Things.
The former is currently sitting in my car, and I'll be trying to offload it to someone who actually wants it.
VDQI explains why chartjunk is bad, and if it reduces the amount of chartjunk in the world, that is good. Many maintain a soft spot for VDQI probably because it's their first a-ha moment in terms of appreciating graphic communication. Certainly there are other directions one could go but most people are not designers. Although, I don't see the same contradiction between DOET and VDQI, I'm curious what you mean about that.
I'm curious. Why do you feel like Tufte's book is a "rebuff" of Norman's book? I've read both and find them complementary in many senses. The one criticism that I have found by Norman of Tufte's work is that Tufte preferred high "data density" but Norman argues that this is not always appropriate.
Norman talks a good deal about cognitive load and that good design is intuitive. Ideally, you shouldn't notice good design because it's near invisible.
OTOH, I recall Tufte going on and on about cutting the "data-ink ratio" to the point of making graphs that we generally understand at a glance suddenly very unintuitive. I can dig into the book again if necessary, but I recall he essentially argued that box-and-whisker plots became just a few dots. There's meaning conveyed by the boxes and the whiskers, and changing that convention - even if it uses more ink than absolutely necessary - adds significant cognitive load.
I might pay the karma tax on this one but I've come to really appreciate "Times New Roman" (or TeX Gyre Termes + STIXTwoMath).
Like the OP, I used to care a lot about fonts. Heck, at some point my Windows boot time got slowed down because of the sheer number of fonts it had to load!
I used to think the default Latex font gives off a "serious" and "scientific" vibe. And I thought to myself: why would anyone ever use TNR when more "soulful" fonts exist?
Now that I'm older (33), I resort back to TNR or TeX Gyre Termes but with one change: I add "FakeBold" to text to make it look like old papers and books: https://x.com/OrganicGPT/status/1920202649481236745/photo/1. I just want my text to convey my thoughts, and I don't want any fancy "serifness" get in the way (so no to Bembo and Palatinno).
I was a heavy user of `pxfonts` back in the day. Good times!
Great to see Bembo being properly appreciated.
It's kind of ironic that a system that ships with Computer Modern doesn't end up creating more Bodoni/Didone fans.
I think a big part of that is that Bodoni-style fonts don’t do so well at low resolutions (and 300 dpi counts as low resolution). It’s somewhat akin to the problem of Optima which loses much of its subtlety when laserprinted even at high resolutions. Bodoni and Didot both call for fine hairlines which lose their grace at screen resolutions and don’t really do that great at laserprinter resolutions either (at 300dpi, with “writes white” laser technology where the whole page is charged and the laser removes the charge from the white parts of the page, the hairlines of CM would often vanish necessitating the “writewhite” hack for the printer modes for those printers).
Indeed. To add some detail—Didone typefaces (th have very high contrast between thick and thin strokes, which at low resolutions seriously affects readability as the thin strokes either disappear altogether, or are badly hinted and anti-aliased.
I hadn't noticed Bembo before but it was quite good looking.
I’m a fan of the closely related Poliphilus which is a somewhat more rumpled interpretation of the same sources.
Really, the whole Stanley Morison–era catalog of Monotype designs is great stuff. I think the only collection of type designs that rivals it is perhaps the Sumner Stone–era Adobe originals.
Quite fond of kpfonts. As much as I use XeTeX because of OpenType, I find myself going back to PDFLaTeX so I can get the benefits of Microtype. I tried some of my docs through LuaTeX, but the results, while fine, were still inferior to the two options above.
I like some variant of STIX (I never know the exact difference) and Gillius Sans
stickstootext
OP should try Scholax as well. I'm very partial to it.