My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

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.

So in, for example, where https://dercuano.github.io/notes/finite-function-circuits.ht... 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: http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano.20191230.pdf#page=1572

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.

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 think a big part of that is that Bodoni-style fonts don’t do so well at low resolutions (and 300 dpi counts as low resolution). It’s somewhat akin to the problem of Optima which loses much of its subtlety when laserprinted even at high resolutions. Bodoni and Didot both call for fine hairlines which lose their grace at screen resolutions and don’t really do that great at laserprinter resolutions either (at 300dpi, with “writes white” laser technology where the whole page is charged and the laser removes the charge from the white parts of the page, the hairlines of CM would often vanish necessitating the “writewhite” hack for the printer modes for those printers).

I might pay the karma tax on this one but I've come to really appreciate "Times New Roman" (or TeX Gyre Termes + STIXTwoMath).

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!

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?

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: https://x.com/OrganicGPT/status/1920202649481236745/photo/1. 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).

It’s hard to see Palatino and Garamond as similar, but perhaps that’s just my typographic training at play. Palatino is much closer to its calligraphic origins than Garamond and has a darker color on the page (the seldom seen Palatino Book weight is a great improvement over the Palatino Medium that’s the default Palatino weight for extended text).

Note also that Palatino was originally designed for Linotype hot metal typesetting and has incorporated in its design the limitations of that system (which, in some ways is actually a bonus for naïve digital setting where ligatures may be limited or non-existent). The most obvious case of this is the lack of character kerns—that is, characters cannot extend beyond their typeset width. This makes the italics look cramped since, e.g., d, l and f cannot reach over the following letter with their ascenders.

Indeed. To add some detail—Didone typefaces (th have very high contrast between thick and thin strokes, which at low resolutions seriously affects readability as the thin strokes either disappear altogether, or are badly hinted and anti-aliased.