I would recommend most fonts that Michael Sharpe worked on. He did some nice refinements on already-decent fonts, often to bring copies closer to the original[1]. Heck, I’d recommend them outside of LaTeX, too.<p>Favorites out of those are XCharter, ScholaX, Etbb and Erewhon.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://ctan.org/author/sharpe" rel="nofollow">https://ctan.org/author/sharpe</a>
Kind of expensive but there isn't actually a lot of choice for fonts with matching math fonts so for my PhD thesis I used Minion 3 + MinionMath.<p>For mono fonts there are a lot of nice choices but I used PragmataPro for no other reasons that I own it and it provided a nice readable contrast.<p>Otherwise for the free options, Palatino+mathpazo or StixTwoText + StixTwoMath are quite good options. Honestly anything but ComputerCM is a good option; it's imho not a very good font nowadays; it's way too thin. It was designed with the assumption that it will be printed on old, fairly bad, printers with significant ink overspill.
The Bembo variant I used for Dercuano, Derctuo, and Dernocua (without LaTeX) is Edward Tufte's ET Book, linked in the article, using the old-style numerals variant. Unfortunately its Unicode coverage is very limited. Fortunately, URW Palladio L (URW's freely-licensed version of Palatino) has fine Unicode coverage, so I used that and Palatino as fallbacks. Unfortunately ET Book's metrics are not very comparable to URW Palladio L's, leading to letter size mismatches when letters mix; its x-height is especially different.<p>So in, for example, where <a href="https://dercuano.github.io/notes/finite-function-circuits.html#addtoc_1" rel="nofollow">https://dercuano.github.io/notes/finite-function-circuits.ht...</a> 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: <a href="http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano.20191230.pdf#page=1572" rel="nofollow">http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano.20191230.pdf#page=1572</a><p>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.<p>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.
I've heard so much praise for <i>The Visual Display of Quantitative Information</i>, but why, I'll never know. I bought it after hearing someone rave about it, and I'll be damned if I didn't hate every page of the book. It felt like a rebuff to <i>The Design of Everyday Things</i>.<p>The former is currently sitting in my car, and I'll be trying to offload it to someone who actually wants it.
I might pay the karma tax on this one but I've come to really appreciate "Times New Roman" (or TeX Gyre Termes + STIXTwoMath).<p>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!<p>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?<p>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: <a href="https://x.com/OrganicGPT/status/1920202649481236745/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/OrganicGPT/status/1920202649481236745/photo/1</a>. 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).
When I was at university I'd sometimes print PDFs as 4 pages per side to save paper, and some LaTeX-generated PDFs had some horrible font that became unreadably pixelated (while on screen it looked fine iirc). Not all PDFs were like this but LaTeX ones more often were culprits.<p>HTML on the other hand printed perfect tiny vector glyphs, so it wasn't the printer's fault.<p>I don't know enough now to find back what bad font this was back then, but I hope the situation is better today for LaTeX PDFs...
Great to see Bembo being properly appreciated.<p>It's kind of ironic that a system that ships with Computer Modern doesn't end up creating more Bodoni/Didone fans.
For LaTeX documents like technical papers...<p>Something like Palatino (or even Computer Modern Roman) for body text.<p>But for headings, humble Helvetica looks good, and a bit less "academic". (I really dislike the default CMR at large point sizes.)<p>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.<p>For a book, I was thinking something slightly flashier for headings, at least on chapters, maybe Linux Biolinum.
it's merely about LaTex font: I use mostly the html-side font for text to spread the weight with markdown renderer. It is also made lighter by using KaTex(which comes with some compromise due to the lack of extension). I found this more coherent along with other types of articles. I'm very fine with non-serif. But this preference varies by person.<p>Examples<p>[1] <a href="https://lukeyoo.fyi/test/data/render/latex-statements-1.md" rel="nofollow">https://lukeyoo.fyi/test/data/render/latex-statements-1.md</a><p>[2] <a href="https://lukeyoo.fyi/recap/2025/5/statistical-inference-1" rel="nofollow">https://lukeyoo.fyi/recap/2025/5/statistical-inference-1</a><p>[3] <a href="https://lukeyoo.fyi/test/data/render/latex-integrals-1.md" rel="nofollow">https://lukeyoo.fyi/test/data/render/latex-integrals-1.md</a><p>[4] <a href="https://lukeyoo.fyi/test/data/render/latex-integrals-in-comparison.md" rel="nofollow">https://lukeyoo.fyi/test/data/render/latex-integrals-in-comp...</a>
I'm personally a fan of using EB Garamond together with Garamond-Math. Ironically I'm actually excited about Granjon's types in it. The Greek is very nice, though unconventional for someone not used to Greek texts. (The Greek letters will look unconventional when used as Greek letters for mathematical typesetting.)
Quite fond of kpfonts. As much as I use XeTeX because of OpenType, I find myself going back to PDFLaTeX so I can get the benefits of Microtype. I tried some of my docs through LuaTeX, but the results, while fine, were still inferior to the two options above.
Genuine question : why are all those fonts serif ones? I personnaly find them much harder to read than sans serif ones (including when printed on paper, not just on screens).