The LaTeX Font Catalogue

by the-mitr • 5 years ago

192 133 5 years ago

the-mitr3• 5 years ago

This has been my go to resource for choosing the fonts before starting a new LaTeX project.

This is great. But how do you use them? I've not ever been able to successfully figure out how to bring new fonts a latex doc (I use miktek).

armalipeddi• 5 years ago

if you click through to the pages for any of the fonts, there is usage instructions and a working example.

zauguin7• 5 years ago

You really want to use LuaLaTeX (if you don't do so already) and then you can just load any font on your system using

    \usepackage{fontspec}
    \setmainfont{Whatever your font's name is}

Especially you don't have to deal with installing old Type 1 fonts which is messy, especially when they are not included in your TeX distribution.

You can also follow the instructions in the catalog which for some fonts show how to use them in pdfLaTeX, but these days pdfLaTeX mostly makes sense if you want to submit to journals which do not accept modern engines and such journals probably don't allow you to change the font anyway.

the-mitr3• 5 years ago

now lot of fonts are available as packages just including those packages will change the default font even with pdflatex

for example:

\usepackage{libertine}

\usepackage{kpfonts}

should get you going

Topolomancer• 5 years ago

An excellent resource. With `fontspec` and `xelatex` or `lualatex`, choosing a font can sometimes be as easy as this:

  \setmainfont{EB Garamond}
  \setsansfont{Myriad Pro}
  \setmonofont{IBM Plex Mono}

No additional packages required!

andrepd• 5 years ago

Unfortunately XeTeX brings some compatibility problems as well as bugs, compared to pdfLaTeX.

TheRealPomax3• 5 years ago

Like? Because I've never seen XeLaTeX do something that made me go "wow time to go back to the legacy tex-that-doesn't-understand-unicode->DVI->PDF route".

zauguin7• 5 years ago

Use LuaTeX. It's not bug free, but it is still developed and most bugs there get fixed relatively fast. Also it is much more flexible anyway.

necovek• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, no language coverage is listed for any of the fonts: I generally care about fonts I can use both for Serbian (Cyrillic) and English texts, including simultaneously (programming, maths).

jtbayly• 5 years ago

Yes. Greek is what I need to know support for.

ZoomZoomZoom• 5 years ago

When you follow to the CTAN, there's Topics section on the right which has tags for Greek and Cyrillic fonts.

stared• 5 years ago

The default LaTeX font is stunningly beautiful! To the point that for me even looking at LaTeX-generated papers in an aesthetic experience.

Recently, I was posting a preprint to arXiv. I intentionally removed a journal style, which changed the font to Times New Roman.

SeanLuke3• 5 years ago

The default LaTeX font is stunningly beautiful!

You may be alone in that. I think the general consensus is that Computer Modern is pretty horrible.

benrbray5• 5 years ago

What?? I've never met anyone who thinks that. Personally I think it's a very hard standard to beat. I rarely see a document with a non standard font that wouldn't look better in computer modern. Especially for math.

jimhefferon2• 5 years ago

I don't think "horrible" is a general opinion, although it is in the end a matter of taste. But you do often hear people who think that the vector derivatives initially made (Knuth's originals were raster) are too light for comfortable reading on a monitor. There have been some recent uploads to CTAN with heavier versions of CM. I remember them as https://www.ctan.org/pkg/newcomputermodern (book weight) and https://www.ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern.

queuebert3• 5 years ago

I want to hate it because it seems so old fashioned, and I constantly search for alternatives, but I keep coming back, because no other font allows me to read dense text for hours at a time.

I guess this Knuth dude knows his stuff.

taeric• 5 years ago

I think it is more a vocal consensus. Granted, most folks don't care.

I also think most of the dislike came from bad pdf rendering for a long time.

brummm• 5 years ago

I have yet to find anything that reads as nicely as Latex generated papers with Computer Modern.

TheRealPomax3• 5 years ago

And what is that thought based on? Because that sounds like a pretty wild claim.

TchoBeer2• 5 years ago

I wonder if it's better for its intended medium (being printed rather than displayed on a screen)

BoxOfRain• 5 years ago

They’re certainly not alone, I’m a huge fan of Computer Modern.

cwales95• 5 years ago

Have to agree. Love how the default font looks! Latex documents are very pleasant to read.

NelsonMinar• 5 years ago

Computer Modern Roman is a shibboleth. When I used to review resumes at Google I'd give extra attention to any resume in CMR; we wanted to hire the kind of nerd who has a resume.tex. I don't like the look of the font myself and long ago switched to Postscript fonts but that's a subjective opinion.

hedberg10• 5 years ago

I would have submitted a Flash based resume out of spite.

adiM3• 5 years ago

In the true nerd spirit, shouldn't you check the pdf metadata to see if the resume was created by tex. I use TeX (well ConTeXt but not LaTeX, but that is a minor difference) for my resume, but without using CM or LM fonts. With Luatex, you can use any opentype font.

dhosek7• 5 years ago

I used to do my resume in TeX (in fact an ancient resume of mine along with the plain TeX macros to format it is on CTAN), but I stopped because in most cases, my resume is getting slurped into some automated system and if it's anything other than a Word document, I end up with a lot of pain.

netineti• 5 years ago

I like the Computer Modern font when printed on paper.

On low DPI screens (e.g. 96 or even 144 DPI), Computer Modern feels too thin and spindly.

Recently, I came across the mlmodern (https://ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern?lang=en) font. It is a "heavier" version of Computer Modern and I use it for all my documents.

pgtan2• 5 years ago

If you have a certain printer to use, you can tweak the Metafont mode for the fonts and create your preferred look. The definitions for various printers are in the file modes.mf

For example:

% From {\tt stsmith@ll.mit.edu}, 10 May 93.

% With |fillin=0|, the diagonal of {\tt cmtt10}'s `z' is too thin.

% |blacker=.8| too thin, 2 too thick.

mode_def docutech = %\[ Xerox 8790 or 4045 (600dpi)

mode_param (pixels_per_inch, 600);

  mode_param (blacker, 1);

  mode_param (fillin, .1);

  mode_param (o_correction, 0.9);

  mode_common_setup_;

enddef;

wvh• 5 years ago

Default LaTeX fonts give me a nasty uncomfortable feeling in the stomach by reminding me of Math and CS tests. I'm not generally sensitive, so it's somewhat amusing a font can have such emotional impact.

As a typeface aficionado I've spent way too much time building font catalogues such as this in the early 2000s; it's good to see that both quality and quantity of freely available fonts has gone up.

wanderer• 5 years ago

Default LaTeX fonts give me a nasty uncomfortable feeling in the stomach by reminding me of Math and CS tests

Me too. The formulas look so dark. Do you know of any typefaces where the mathematics and physics formulas look lighter, and, at least to some of us, less imposing?

Santosh83• 5 years ago

Are these fonts available for use outside LaTeX? Seems like they're spread all over the place instead of collected in one repository.

queuebert3• 5 years ago

There are the Tex Gyre fonts, but part of what makes Computer Modern in LaTeX look so good is the typesetting quality.

I believe TeX actually solves a convex optmization problem to find the optimum inter-word spacing for each line while considering every line on the page. That's why you don't get those crazy large spacings in LaTeX that you sometimes see in Word.

maxnoe• 5 years ago

One Paragraph, not the whole Page afaik

red_trumpet• 5 years ago

Also hyphenation helps with avoiding large spacings.

bluenose692• 5 years ago

If you employ the `microtype` package, latex will also be able to make adjustments to inter-letter spacing. This can improve results by evening out the "weight". The results are subtle, though -- nothing like the huge improvements that result from switching from msword to latex.

Another slick trick is that latex (really, tex) lets you alter the weightings used in the optimization, paragraph by paragraph. And you can alter the weightings used in deciding where to put page breaks. You can also supply hints on hyphenation, for those rare cases in which the engine cannot decide what to do. (Note: the system adjusts hyphenation to the language, so e.g. those long words in German will be handled well.)

The optimization scheme is a large part of what makes tex so good. That, and the understanding of mathematical notation.

Anyone who wants to get insights into the early setup of tex might enjoy reading the following Knuth (1979). It's a very engaging read, for something that's technical. (Generally, Knuth is a great writer.)

References

Knuth, Donald E. “Mathematical Typography.” Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 1, no. 2 (March 1979): 337–72.

Isthatablackgsd• 5 years ago

Yes, you click the OTF or TTF link to get the file.

Some of them didn't offer a link but you still can grab them from the CTAN repository. You would need to do navigate more to get the file. You can get the Type1 and AFM/PFM files (old font formats back in the day).You would need to convert those format to TTF/OTF because some software don't have support for Type1 and AFM/PFM files. You can convert them with FontTools (python).

matoyce• 5 years ago

I always use the San-serif fonts in the catalog. It makes the document looks presentable and makes more readable.

TacticalCoder• 5 years ago

Twenty years ago I did typeset a 440 pages or so book using LaTeX. Sadly the editor wanted a "conventional" look and not the LaTeX one. I ended up using the "Utopia" (it's in the catalogue) font as the main font and sneaked as much "LaTeXism" as I could without getting caught ; )

The editor also had zero familiarity with Linux / LaTeX (it was all QuarkXPress back then) and hence wasn't confident in the digital files produced by LaTeX and the converters (say ps2pdf etc.) so in the end a high quality print copy ended being flashed. So it was still a partly "analog" process even though the computer-to-plate age had already started.

Good memories.

cpach2• 5 years ago

Out of curiosity, what does flash refer to in this context?

jjgreen4• 5 years ago

Photolithography?

benrbray5• 5 years ago

book.swf

brnt• 5 years ago

I did the opposite once. In a time before I knew Latex, I had to hand in something typeset in Latex. Instead I used Open Office with the Computer Modern typeface, and handed in my work as PDF, and my teacher never figured it out.

tombert• 5 years ago

The monsters who make LaTeX don't have Comic Sans. I guess I need to stick with XeLaTeX :)

jansan2• 5 years ago

The legendary CERN slides: https://www.slideshare.net/xzxzxz/atlas-higgs-cernseminar201...

rpmuller• 5 years ago

I also like this page for latex fonts: https://r2src.github.io/top10fonts/

8589934591• 5 years ago

I use roboto light sans serif font for my resume. Are there better alternatives to CM for reading on the screen? I found mlmodern so far to be a good alternative, but would like to know from others as well.

robertwt7• 5 years ago

One of the best thing that ever happen to me is learning LaTeX to write my paper..

since then, I wrote my resume, cover letter, and everything else with it

Results are beautiful and highly customisable

Breza• 5 years ago

I have only dabbled in it yet every project ends up looking stunning. I'm a corporate data scientist and I'm considering using it for more of my research findings and the like.

The LaTeX Font Catalogue

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