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My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

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Re: My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

#21

Post by atrettel »

mynameisash wrote: post #9

I've heard so much praise for The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , 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 The Design of Everyday Things . The former is currently sitting in my car, and I'll be trying to offload it to someone who actually wants it.

I'm curious. Why do you feel like Tufte's book is a "rebuff" of Norman's book? I've read both and find them complementary in many senses. The one criticism that I have found by Norman of Tufte's work is that Tufte preferred high "data density" but Norman argues that this is not always appropriate.

Re: My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

#22

Post by iisan7 »

mynameisash wrote: post #9

I've heard so much praise for The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , 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 The Design of Everyday Things . The former is currently sitting in my car, and I'll be trying to offload it to someone who actually wants it.

VDQI explains why chartjunk is bad, and if it reduces the amount of chartjunk in the world, that is good. Many maintain a soft spot for VDQI probably because it's their first a-ha moment in terms of appreciating graphic communication. Certainly there are other directions one could go but most people are not designers. Although, I don't see the same contradiction between DOET and VDQI, I'm curious what you mean about that.

Re: My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

#23

Post by mynameisash »

atrettel wrote: post #21
mynameisash wrote: post #9

I've heard so much praise for The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , 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 The Design of Everyday Things . The former is currently sitting in my car, and I'll be trying to offload it to someone who actually wants it.

I'm curious. Why do you feel like Tufte's book is a "rebuff" of Norman's book? I've read both and find them complementary in many senses. The one criticism that I have found by Norman of Tufte's work is that Tufte preferred high "data density" but Norman argues that this is not always appropriate.

Norman talks a good deal about cognitive load and that good design is intuitive. Ideally, you shouldn't notice good design because it's near invisible.

OTOH, I recall Tufte going on and on about cutting the "data-ink ratio" to the point of making graphs that we generally understand at a glance suddenly very unintuitive. I can dig into the book again if necessary, but I recall he essentially argued that box-and-whisker plots became just a few dots. There's meaning conveyed by the boxes and the whiskers, and changing that convention - even if it uses more ink than absolutely necessary - adds significant cognitive load.

Re: My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

#26

Post by ayongpm »

behnamoh wrote: post #16

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 T…

I swear I was looking for exactly what FakeBold did years ago. Thanks for sharing that!

Re: My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

#27

Post by fodkodrasz »

mhd wrote: post #4

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. Favorites out of those are XCharter, ScholaX, Etbb and Erewhon. 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. [1]: https…

Your link is the most authentic LaTeX experience for beginners: fonts with no preview/screenshot on their homepage... LaTeX users already know it, why make screenshots :D

The blog post does this some justice though, the author does live in the current century, and does have nice examples.

/me is former LaTeX user from uni, not overly fond of it, for usability issues not unrelated to its legacy.

Re: My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

#28

Post by drwu »

behnamoh wrote: post #16

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 T…

Unfortunately, the rendering of fakebold (especially if the factor is not 2) depends on PDF readers and printers. Some PDF programs handle it well, some fix the factor at 2, some do not implement it at all.

Re: My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)

#30

Post by MarcusE1W »

guizzmo wrote: post #29

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).

I think the general idea is that Serif-fonts are better readable in book style documents and Sans-Serif fonts are better for short documents or maybe computer displays.
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