Hacker News Reader

Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

The definitive nerd font is Computer Modern[0], i think.

Certainly it is true that i trust anything with lots of math in it more if it is typeset in CM. Problem sets feel downright homey after a while.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern

View on HN

That is not what this link is. This is a link to a project that aggregates all popular font icons (font awesome, material, etc) into a single project.

They also have actual fonts:

https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads

I've found source code sans to be an excellent font for LaTeX, and the companion source code pro for code blocks. They are significantly more readable to me and to most people I know, though that may have to do with screens being much higher-resolution than when computer modern was created.

Here's my arm-chair hypothesis: the thin connecting lines (don't know the technical font term, though I'm sure one exists) showed up fine on low-res screens because they simply couldn't be made thinner than a certain amount. On high-res screens, they get much thinner, and my eyes have trouble tracking them. Easier to read on paper, though.

The technical term is "hairline," though that tends to get used primarily in fonts that have high stroke contrast, of which Computer Modern is most definitely an example.

Personally I prefer IBM Plex Mono and family. https://github.com/IBM/plex

Yes! Such a great font. I recently spent too much time reviewing mono fonts for programming and IBM Plex Mono was my top.

Office Code Pro was my runner up.

They would be more popular with cooler names like Fira and Hack. ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com