My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)
11 comments
·May 17, 2025mhd
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.
Xophmeister
Palatino with Microtype is my go to for all my LaTeX documents. It looks so good.
ahartmetz
My standard font package is "mathpazo", which is Palatino with maths support. I obviously like Palatino - and if it isn't available, Garamond is similar.
If ever have to do much LaTeX again though, I'll check out the alternatives because the mess of partially compatible modules and the troubles with figure placement are still bad in LaTeX.
drob518
Palatino has been my favorite font since it first appeared on the Macintosh.
mynameisash
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.
flenserboy
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.
fidotron
Great to see Bembo being properly appreciated.
It's kind of ironic that a system that ships with Computer Modern doesn't end up creating more Bodoni/Didone fans.
jovas
I like some variant of STIX (I never know the exact difference) and Gillius Sans
amoshebb
stickstootext
groos
OP should try Scholax as well. I'm very partial to it.
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.