Monotype’s Bembo is a commercial font, although a web-font version of ET Book, the font used in Tufte’s books, has been made available for free by Tufte himself. While these books were not composed in a TeX system, they have inspired the development of the tufte-latex document class to produce similarly designed books as well as handouts.īooks by Edward Tufte (click to enlarge). This is due at least in part to the work of Edward Tufte (known among other things for his writings on data visualisation) whose remarkably-well-designed books use Bembo as their body text font. While its old-style appearance may make it unsuitable for certain documents, Bembo has received some attention from the LaTeX community. Aldus Manutius, one of the most important printers of his age, used the font to publish a short work by the cleric Pietro Bembo, after whom Monotype’s face is named.īembo remains one of today’s most popular book fonts, having been used by publishing houses such as Penguin Books or the Oxford University Press. Released by the Monotype Corporation in 1929, the font’s roman style is based on a design by Francesco Griffo (an Italian punchcutter who created the first italic type) from c. And now on to the fonts! Fonts Bemboīembo is the oldest typeface in this survey. I give further details on the configuration used for producing the samples as well as on the sources of the sample text in the final two sections of this text. In the remaining cases, I use whichever format is available. when a font is provided in Type 1 through a LaTeX package and also available as OpenType) I provide two samples, one for each configuration. While Type 1 fonts (which often have dedicated LaTeX packages) are the simplest to setup and are available on most distributions (which makes them a good choice when co-writing documents, for example), OpenType fonts are more complete and customisable in their options and represent the best current standard in digital typography. As a monospaced font, I chose Raph Levien’s excellent Inconsolata, a popular choice not only in the TeX world but also as the main font in text editors.Īs mentioned above, engines such as LuaLaTeX make the use of OpenType fonts possible in LaTeX. 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). 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). When selecting a font for a document, it is therefore important to consider whether the font supports mathematical characters (at least if we will be typing some maths!) and also to choose an appropriate sans-serif font to accompany it (the monospaced font often differs more visibly from the roman). When using LaTeX, three types of fonts can be selected and are commonly used: a roman or serif font which is normally employed for body text and which should have maths support a sans-serif font which is sometimes used for headers and a monospaced or typewriter font. Longer samples for each font (code and resulting PDF file) are available on this GitHub repo. I also provide a small sample of each font (containing both text and maths) so that the different choices can be easily assessed and compared. These are: Bembo, Palatino, Crimson, Libertine, STIX, Charter and Utopia. In the paragraphs below, I list and give a brief description of seven fonts which I personally like (where the original fonts are commercial, I focus on free alternatives). As I moved forward with my search, I also became interested in the history and rationale behind the design of different fonts and this led me to write some descriptive notes on each of my favourites. My goal was to select a small group of high-quality free fonts which I could later choose from when typesetting different documents. As a result, a plethora of font packages and even OpenType-compatible engines (XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX) have emerged in the past 20 years.Ī while ago, I set out to explore this extensive set of LaTeX font options. While these fonts are excellent, they have become so ubiquitous in the scientific community that many LaTeX users have sought alternative fonts for their documents. TeX and related systems are often associated with their default fonts, Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern (CM) typefaces. My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (part I)
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