Does MinionMath cover all ligature? My reason for mostly sticking with Latin Modern Math is because I don't have to worry about random characters being unprintable.

MLModern [0] is a thicker version of Donald Knuth's Computer Modern and the Latin Modern project, in case you are interested.

[0] https://ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern

+1 for Minion Pro, Minion Math, and PragmataPro. Those fonts have been my preferred defaults for years now. While they are expensive, it is worth it to write in a beautiful font and to compensate the artistic work that went into making them.

Your link is the most authentic LaTeX experience for beginners: fonts with no preview/screenshot on their homepage... LaTeX users already know it, why make screenshots :D

The blog post does this some justice though, the author does live in the current century, and does have nice examples.

/me is former LaTeX user from uni, not overly fond of it, for usability issues not unrelated to its legacy.

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.

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.

Microtype is such an insanely good package, I love it

Palatino has been my favorite font since it first appeared on the Macintosh.

Palatino and Baskerville are underrated. I don’t know why Times is the default in so many things.

How much is FakeBold doing there, though? Easy to say it’s “just” TNR, but if the features of TNR that make it characterless have been supplanted with something soulful, then haven’t you just found a soulful typeface that you like?

Unfortunately, the rendering of fakebold (especially if the factor is not 2) depends on PDF readers and printers. Some PDF programs handle it well, some fix the factor at 2, some do not implement it at all.

I swear I was looking for exactly what FakeBold did years ago. Thanks for sharing that!

the default latex font is called Computer Modern, and I specifically use a webfont version of it on my personal site/blog because of the “serious” and “scientific” vibe you describe.

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).

I hadn't noticed Bembo before but it was quite good looking.

I thought the whole point of serif fonts is that they are easier to read. But the author addresses your question:

> This survey focuses on serif fonts as these are the usual choice for longer documents such as articles or books (although sans-serifs have become more popular for longer text in recent years). However, in keeping with the reasoning above, I have also selected accompanying sans-serif fonts for each of the seven roman choices below (all of which have maths support of some form or another).

I think the general idea is that Serif-fonts are better readable in book style documents and Sans-Serif fonts are better for short documents or maybe computer displays.

It is likely that you find them harder to read mostly because you are less habituated to them.

For many of the older generations, who have spent their childhood reading thousands of books printed using serif fonts, at a time when there was no easy access to computer terminals, serif fonts are easier to read.

In general, the readability of a typeface is determined more by other features than by whether it is has or it does not have serifs.

The sans serif typefaces have appeared first after the Napoleonic wars, as simplified typefaces, suitable for low-quality printing used for titles or advertisements that should be readable from a distance.

Having simplified letter forms, sans serif typefaces remain preferable for low-resolution displays of for very small text or for text that must be read from a great distance.

However, until WWII, the simplification of the letter forms has been pushed too far, resulting in many letters that are too similar, so they can no longer be distinguished. There are many such sans serif typefaces that have been modified very little from their pre-WWII ancestors, like Helvetica and Arial, which are too simplified so that they should be avoided in any computing applications due to the great probability of misreading anything that is not plain English.

After WWII, and especially after 1990, there has been a reversal in the evolution of the sans serif typefaces, away from excessive simplification and towards making them more similar to serif typefaces, except for the serifs.

A well-known example of such a sans-serif typeface is FF Meta (Erik Spiekermann, 1991), but it had a lot of imitators. Such non-simplified sans-serifs typefaces have e.g. traditional Caroline shapes for the lower-case "a", "g" and "l" and also true italic variants (i.e. not just oblique variants).

Besides the removal of serifs, a traditional simplification in the sans serif typefaces is the removal of the contrast between thin lines and thick lines, making the thickness of the lines uniform. At least for me, any long text printed with a font with uniform line thickness looks boring, so I strongly prefer the sans serif fonts that go even further in their resemblance with serif fonts, by having thin lines and thick lines, for example Optima nova and Palatino Sans.

While any sans serif typeface by definition does not have serifs, when Hermann Zapf has designed Optima (which was released in 1958), he has found an alternative to serifs, which achieves a similar optical effect. Starting from a line that has the form of a long rectangle, instead of attaching serifs to the ends, one can make the 2 lateral long edges of the rectangle concave, instead of flat. After that, one has 2 alternatives for how to terminate the ends of the line. The first is to also make concave the 2 short terminal edges. This results in sharp corners for the line and it is the solution chosen by Zapf in Optima. The second method of line termination is to keep the terminal edges flat or even slightly convex and to round the corners where they meet the concave lateral edges. This is the method chosen by Akira Kobayashi in Palatino Sans (2006), under the influence of the similar line terminations used in Cooper Black and in the rounded sans-serif typefaces that are popular for public signage in Japan.

This alternative to serifs, with concave lateral edges, is in my opinion superior both to serifs and to classic sans serifs, but unfortunately it is effective only on very high-resolution displays or on paper (even a cheap laser printer has better resolution than the most expensive monitors), because on low resolution monitors any slightly concave edges will become straight.

In any case, for the best readability, I never use fonts with ambiguous characters, like Helvetica/Arial and most other sans serifs. Instead of that, serif fonts are better, but even better are good modern sans serifs which have been designed carefully, to have distinctive characters. With good monitors, fonts with contrast between thin lines and thick lines, or even with concave lateral line edges, are preferable.

I read this HN thread rendered in the Palatino Sans mentioned in TFA (with the italic of Palatino nova configured as its italic form; the italic of Palatino Sans Informal is also a good choice, but I prefer a stronger contrast between the regular and the italic variants of a font; that is why I have also configured the italic of Bauer Bodoni as the italic for Optima nova).

While in TFA Palatino Sans was dismissed with regret, for having to be purchased, I have bought Palatino Sans, together with a few other high-quality typefaces and I use them on Linux, instead of the available free fonts. I consider the money that I have spent on good typefaces as some of the best purchasing decisions that I have made.

However, for CLI/TUI applications and program editing, I use the free JetBrains Mono. Unlike for regular text, for programming there are many high-quality free fonts, but I prefer JetBrains Mono because it supports an extended character set, with many Unicode mathematical symbols that are missing in other programming fonts.

Microtype support for LuaTeX doesn't look so bad. At least on paper...

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/654089/microtypograp...

I always use Atkinson Hyperlegible. It's great for the bad presentation situations one often is in (bad presenters, or simply the head of the person in front of you cutting off the lower part of the letters).

stickstootext