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.
It's kind of ironic that a system that ships with Computer Modern doesn't end up creating more Bodoni/Didone fans.
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.
The former is currently sitting in my car, and I'll be trying to offload it to someone who actually wants it.
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.
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).
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.
Xophmeister•6h ago
ahartmetz•5h ago
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.
dhosek•2h ago
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.
drob518•5h ago
spookie•2h ago