I’ve really enjoyed reading the opinions on the fonts I grow up with on Practical Typography. I am referring to the likes of Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri, Georgia, Baskerville, etc.
Recently discovered LaTeX and am curious about your thoughts on Latin Modern, the default typeface. I’m not very invested in LaTeX yet but if I do get into it, curious about recommendations for it too.
I’m afraid I don’t use LaTeX. Nor do I use default fonts.
It is a good font, functional and legible, and fits exceptionally well with the default math font. After all, that was Don Knuth’s point when making CM, and it’s not really about winning contests on type design ingenuity.
I like Computer Modern very much but I would much rather prefer a proper LaTeX integration of Matthew’s typefaces.
You can use my fonts (or any OTF fonts) with XeLaTeX.
That was indeed a very pleasant surprise. Curious if there are any professional fonts with also have excellent math support.
STIX Two was designed for a large consortium of scientific publishers. It’s a TNR-inspired workhorse with version/s for math.
For LaTeX, use the fontspec package.
These fonts function well outside of mathematics (for example, for Swedish text using Microsoft Word and Libre Office).
IBM Plex Serif now has a beta version of the long-awaited IBM Plex Math font. (I linked its GitHub repository above.)
Latin Modern does not properly use or encode Unicode, so a Latin Modern pdf (generated by XeTeX or LuaTeX with fontspec) is defective – at least for cutting-&-pasting text (and presumably searching for text via Google, etc.), e.g., for a LaTeXed mathematical alpha $\alpha$ (or a Unicode Greek alpha), using a SIAM journal style.
STIX Two Text is excellent for the Latin and Cyrillic scripts and for the modern monotonic Greek language.
IMHO, with its great textual and mathematical fonts, the STIX Two typeface might well be listed in MB’s Alternatives to Cambria page.
Today (6 March 2024), Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography lists the following Cambria alternatives :
Been trying out IBM Plex Math and it’s a treat! Thank you so much for remembering this thread!
Also thanks for pointing out the updates to Cambria alternatives. Elena and Skolar are just lovely.