Monaspace

I'm using "Bell MT" to replace Times in browser (and also using it for variable-pitch font in emacs Org mode), it is good but I wish it had a taller/condensed version.

Also, one of the best condensed mono font is "The Sans Mono Condensed" which first popularized by early Oreilly books (it has since switched to other mono fonts). The downside is that it only has a western character set but I liked it a lot

• The design of Computer Modern was based on Monotype Modern 8A, which was made by a "real typographer" for Monotype corporation and used for decades in several textbooks by Addison-Wesley, including the first editions of TAOCP volumes 1–3 (and 2nd ed of vol 1).

• Knuth got close feedback on the font specimens at various steps of the process (and incorporated the suggestions) from many of the world's top font designers, in particular Hermann Zapf, Matthew Carter, Richard Southall, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, who between them are behind such typefaces as Palatino, Optima, Verdana, Georgia, and Lucida. (Zapf and Southall visited Knuth at Stanford and spent weeks working closely with him on the fonts.) I imagine they wouldn't have spent so much time on it if they thought it was "garbage".

• Of course, Computer Modern, and Monotype Modern before it, are (intentionally) boring "workhorse" fonts for textbooks and won't win any points for being stylish or novel or a work of typographic genius — but within that category, CM is AFAICT something close to the best possible rendering of the basic design, very far from "garbage". I'm curious who thinks otherwise. (I've read a few reviews from typographers and no one said the font was bad; one I remember praised the even "texture" of the page, though that was more a result of TeX's Knuth–Plass line-breaking rather than the font itself.)

• (There is also a well-known issue with CM's appearance on low-resolution devices like computer screens rather than print, and especially the "spindly" appearance of the vector font that usually ends up getting used today if one asks for Computer Modern—see my answer at https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722 and links in the comments on it—but those have nothing to do with Knuth's design; in fact Knuth personally still uses the Metafont-generated bitmap fonts unlike everyone else. And there are now "newcomputermodern" and "mlmodern" to remedy this.)

  from fontTools import ttLib
  from path import Path

  output_dir = Path('mono')
  for file in Path('.').files('*.otf'):
      print(file)
      font = ttLib.TTFont(file)
      font['post'].isFixedPitch = 1
      font['OS/2'].panose.bProportion = 9
      font.save(output_dir / file.name)
      font.close()